When USDA announced the 2109 version of its Market Facilitation Program (MFP) last week, which is intended to mitigate the impact of ongoing trade tensions, it indicated that payments would be “based on a single county rate multiplied by a farm’s total plantings to those crops in aggregate in 2019.” No payment rate was indicated. Adding confusion to planting decisions, USDA Secretary Perdue stated yesterday in a meeting with farmers in Pennsylvania that the planting requirements were not yet a certainty. The most timely decision farmers face is whether to hurriedly plant before the crop insurance deadline, plant late after the deadline, or make prevented planting claims under their crop insurance coverage. The final plant...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.