Food Price Fun compares the theory of food prices to practices of buying food. On the one hand the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index (CPI) food prices provide the benchmark for the macroeconomy of food. But … Continue reading →
While reviewing 2024 household expenditures at year’s end, the items within each grocery bill were retrievable. Access to this level of analysis opens new opportunities for understanding food prices. In the random data universe, this is an n=1. In other … Continue reading →
Biomass Rules operates at the intersection of production agricultural food production and opportunities to bring value-adding, agricultural byproducts back into the economy through reuse. The moving target for value-adding byproducts is the pool of undervalued wastes. The knowledge of agricultural … Continue reading →
This chart is from the USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS), USDA Agricultural Projections to 2034, released on 2/18/25. The 2025 USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum occurred the following week, 2/27-28/25. This series of events mark the end of the last US … Continue reading →
One fun announcement from last week’s, USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum was the release of a finer resolution of field boundaries in the continental United States. The United States with the exception of Hawaii is available at a 10-meter resolution. This … Continue reading →
Last Thursday and Friday, (2/27 & 2/28/2025), the USDA held their annual February, Agricultural Outlook Forum in DC. This marks the start of another growing season. The February date allows for last year’s crop year data to be tabulated and … Continue reading →
On the eve of USDA’s Ag Outlook Forum, Scott Irwin posted his analysis, Trends in the Operational Efficiency of the U.S. Ethanol Industry: 2024 Update. It looks at four simultaneous outputs: ethanol, DDGS, corn oil, and CO2, from dry-mill ethanol … Continue reading →
The price of eggs reported by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics used in the January Consumer Price Index (CPI), was $4.95 per dozen. In many places it is higher than this. In the Midwest if you know where to … Continue reading →
When markets fail to perform efficiently does that mean only a government policy fix will work? Or when the government policies fail does that mean only a market fix will succeed? In a word, no. This chart shows the total … Continue reading →
When the benefits of an activity are difficult to put a dollar value on, or monetize, the traditional cost curves don’t tell the whole story. Total costs are the sum of all the variable costs and fixed costs. Undervalued community … Continue reading →
