Yesterday, Judge William Alsup, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern California District, said the USDA firings were likely unlawful and ordered that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) halt the action. That is a follow-on to 14 February when USDA issued a statement outlining the actions the agency has taken to eliminate positions at USDA and terminated, or at least put on administrative leave, thousands of nonpartisan employees across the Department. Those include the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS) National Animal Health Laboratory program office, the Forest Service (FS), the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Farm Service Agency (FSA), and the Rural Development mission area (RD). Ac...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.
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...