US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
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Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#2Save you a click:
"The rancher is selling calves for record sums, but is not better off because he has higher costs. The feedlot company is selling for all-time high prices, but it also has to pay them in the first place. The packers are losing money because there is a limit to what they can charge. Restaurants and supermarkets also can only increase prices by so much."
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#3yeah, it's called inflation, it really sucks for everyone except the people who receive the new money early (mainly the banking system, but also people w/liquid assets + finance adjacent industries like housing) we should avoid it oh well i guess a bunch of people will go bankrupt and then get bought up at distressed prices by people with access to new money early wait a second...
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#4Save you a click: "The rancher is selling calves for record sums, but is not better off because he has higher costs. The feedlot company is selling for all-time high prices, but it also has to pay them in the first place. The packers are losing money because there is a limit to what they can charge. Restaurants and supermarkets also can only increase prices by so much."
Many people see this as a problem, but I see it as a normal function of market economies. Disruptions, changes in government policy, changes in consumer behavior, and more will over the long term just work themselves out. Of course some policies or seemingly "voluntary" policies may cause undue price increases, but even those work themselves out.
At the end of the day as more and more people want to consume the same products the prices for those are going to just go up.
When I see folks really hammering on price increases for products like beef or gas I can't help but think of how absolutely screwed we are in terms of addressing climate change if it involves consumer behavior.
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#5My father-in-law grew up on a small-time farm and then went into environmental engineering as a professor, and briefly worked on the Secretary of Agriculture's staff in the Biden administration. He has told me that there are 3-5 (can't remember the number) colossal meatpacking corporations in the US that have laid waste to smaller-time competition, and now that the market is captured their owners and shareholders can skim basically whatever they want out of the enterprise. He also was advocating to have policy written that would stop chronic underpayment of slaughterhouse and meatpacking workers at these colossal firms and was told it was politically inviable.
Unrelated to this, but I have Alpha-Gal Syndrome, the anaphylactic allergy to red meat, which is spreading rapidly as the ticks colonize every square inch of nature in the US. In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule (AGS is sensitization + symptoms, not just sensitization.)
I think that things are going to get weird with beef in the US in the next few decades.
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#6yeah, it's called inflation, it really sucks for everyone except the people who receive the new money early (mainly the banking system, but also people w/liquid assets + finance adjacent industries like housing) we should avoid it oh well i guess a bunch of people will go bankrupt and then get bought up at distressed prices by people with access to new money early wait a second...
Its meat processors having a monopoly.
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#7My father-in-law grew up on a small-time farm and then went into environmental engineering as a professor, and briefly worked on the Secretary of Agriculture's staff in the Biden administration. He has told me that there are 3-5 (can't remember the number) colossal meatpacking corporations in the US that have laid waste to smaller-time competition, and now that the market is captured their owners and shareholders can…
The article specifically talks about how some of those huge meatpacking companies are losing money on cattle. I don't think it's them to blame in totality here.
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#8My father-in-law grew up on a small-time farm and then went into environmental engineering as a professor, and briefly worked on the Secretary of Agriculture's staff in the Biden administration. He has told me that there are 3-5 (can't remember the number) colossal meatpacking corporations in the US that have laid waste to smaller-time competition, and now that the market is captured their owners and shareholders can…
From the article:
"Four companies - Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef - control around 85% of American beef processing.
That high level of market concentration has drawn accusations of price-fixing, even from President Trump.
So you might expect that those four firms are currently making huge profits from high beef prices. Yet the opposite is happening.
Tyson, the biggest of the four, reported in May that it had lost more than $500m on beef in the first half of its financial year."
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#9yeah, it's called inflation, it really sucks for everyone except the people who receive the new money early (mainly the banking system, but also people w/liquid assets + finance adjacent industries like housing) we should avoid it oh well i guess a bunch of people will go bankrupt and then get bought up at distressed prices by people with access to new money early wait a second...
Its meat processors having a monopoly.
[deleted]
Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money
#10Save you a click: "The rancher is selling calves for record sums, but is not better off because he has higher costs. The feedlot company is selling for all-time high prices, but it also has to pay them in the first place. The packers are losing money because there is a limit to what they can charge. Restaurants and supermarkets also can only increase prices by so much."
Many people see this as a problem, but I see it as a normal function of market economies. Disruptions, changes in government policy, changes in consumer behavior, and more will over the long term just work themselves out. Of course some policies or seemingly "voluntary" policies may cause undue price increases, but even those work themselves out. At the end of the day as more and more people want to consume the same…
A lot of these markets aren't really functioning when there are many middlemen that have an 2-4 company oligopoly that choke out any actual competition.
Many markets don't really have 'competition'