How can economic research and engineering work together toward the common goal of informing funding policies and decisions in order to prioritize limited dollars and maximize return on investment?
Most trade agreements are of benefit to agriculture commodity exports, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement was no different. More access to markets previously not available due to high trade restrictions can be beneficial to parties interested in the international commodity markets.
We have done an analysis to understand the relationship among monthly average ethanol prices versus ethanol ending stocks, corn prices, and gasoline prices. The major finding was that all of three predictors, i.e., ethanol ending stocks, corn prices, and gasoline prices, have statistically significant influences on monthly average ethanol prices.
Carl Zulauf and Gary Schnitkey recently published a brief research paper in Farmdoc Daily (FDD) in which they studied the loss ratio of all major insured crops and then individually for each of the four crops. These crops included corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat. Given the national variability in weather, crop insurance purchase patterns (plan, coverage level, etc.) the application of the analysis to Iowa makes sense. This analysis follows.
The recently released NASS harvested yields can be used to estimate the 2016 Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) payments planned for payment in the fall. These estimates will likely vary from the final Farm Service Agency (FSA) yields used to calculate the actual payments this fall and should only be used as approximations.
In 2016, Mexico was the third largest value market for U.S. agricultural products, after China and Canada. The 2016 value of U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico was up 0.8% to $17.9 billion from 2015, but down 7.9% compared with the record value in 2014 ($19.5 billion).
We recently put together a brief article on the actuarial performance of corn and soybean crop insurance premiums in Iowa from 2001-2015. This article was patterned after work done by Carl Zulauf and Gary Schnitkey from Farmdoc Daily in Illinois.
I was reading a Reuters Media article dated March 15, 2017 entitled “New, safer U.S. rail cars gather dust even as ethanol trains grow longer”. The article referred to the recent spill of ethanol from a unit train derailment in northwest Iowa.
In 2016, Canada was the second largest market for U.S. agricultural products with a value of $20.5 billion. The leading market destination in 2016 was China, with $21.4 billion worth of U.S. agricultural exports. The export composition of these two markets is different, with U.S. exports to China consisting mainly of bulk commodities, particularly U.S. soybeans.
Pure or traditional biodiesel is known as Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) and renewable diesel (also known as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil or HVO) often are confused. They are both made from organic biomass, but are different products due to their production process and quality attributes.
