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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

#91

Post by ikidd »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #16

> A new pick-up truck that once cost $40,000 now runs to $100,000. A wooden fence post has gone from about $6 to as much as $19. A quarter-mile roll of barbed wire has doubled, from $60 to $130. Everything he uses day to day, he says, has jumped in price since the Covid pandemic. I know why pick-ups have gone up in cost (though I don't think it's quite to 2.5x levels like suggested here since the pandemic), but woode…

Tariffs I'm guessing. A fencepost in Canada is CAD$8 so $6. A roll of barbwire is US$70.

See UFA.com for Canadian prices. Keep in mind, there's a lot of variance in what people prefer to use, I'm just giving what I've always used and while prices have gone up, it sure hasn't gone up 2.5X here.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#92

Post by vel0city »

numbers_guy wrote: post #54
walthamstow wrote: post #39

The amount of beef eaten per person per year in the USA is absolutely insane anyway: USA - 37kg/capita UK - 18kg/capita We're not exactly shy of roast beef on this island either - the French nicknamed us "rosbifs" for a reason.

I don't remember when I first found out, but it blew my mind that sausages in the US are typically beef. Like, what? Sausages are like quintessentially pork products. Like the whole point is that you have a lot of off cuts of a cheap meat and you make sausages. Beef sausages? Yeah, that's like a step change in wealth, haha.

I wouldn't say they're "typically" all beef. When you go shopping for something like hotdogs for instance, if you just pick up a package of "hot dogs" or "weiners" they'll typically be a mixture of chicken, turkey, pork, and maybe beef. For instance:

https://www.oscarmayer.com/products/00044700000045-bun-lengt...

Some people really look down on these kinds of products though and see this as a "mystery meat" of extremely poor quality cuts. The whole phrase of "knowing how the sausage is made" comes to mind. So that's then in comparison to "franks", which are often 100% beef and are often seen as higher quality:

https://www.oscarmayer.com/products/00044700073377-jumbo-bee...

Are they higher quality? Eh. They're probably about the same in the end. One big thing pushing up the popularity of beef franks over pork/chicken/turkey mix is an impression of Kosher hotdogs being of very high quality during the time when meat packing was really bad, so lots of even non-Jewish people will often see Kosher dogs as superior. Which, for obvious reasons, have beef and not pork.

Brats are usually pork. For example:

https://johnsonville.com/products/original-bratwurst/

This is then true for other kinds of common sausages as well. Kielbasa is usually a pork and beef combination, maybe with some chicken or turkey:

https://www.hillshirefarm.com/products/smoked-sausages/00044...

They even make a point to say "smoked sausage" versus "beef smoked sausage".

https://www.hillshirefarm.com/products/smoked-sausages/00044...

https://www.hillshirefarm.com/products/smoked-sausages/00044...

Things like chicken sausages are also quite popular.

https://www.aidells.com/products/lunch-dinner-sausage/007640...

And one can't forget things like andouille sausage which is quite popular in a lot of Cajun dishes.

https://www.aidells.com/products/lunch-dinner-sausage/007640...

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#93

Post by Dylan16807 »

numbers_guy wrote: post #54
walthamstow wrote: post #39

The amount of beef eaten per person per year in the USA is absolutely insane anyway: USA - 37kg/capita UK - 18kg/capita We're not exactly shy of roast beef on this island either - the French nicknamed us "rosbifs" for a reason.

I don't remember when I first found out, but it blew my mind that sausages in the US are typically beef. Like, what? Sausages are like quintessentially pork products. Like the whole point is that you have a lot of off cuts of a cheap meat and you make sausages. Beef sausages? Yeah, that's like a step change in wealth, haha.

I don't know well "all other pork" and retail ground beef work as proxies for sausage meat. But ground beef roughly doubled in price from 2010 to the start of 2020. Before it did that, it was very close in price to "all other pork", and before 2000 a bit cheaper.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#94

Post by ericmay »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #84
ericmay wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wasn't a non-sequitur. Instead of repeating myself I'll just link to this good explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197575

That explanation doesn't work. They advocated for competition instead of ogliopoly. You decided to talk about a completely different and irrelevant way there could be a lack of competition. Even if your conclusion is right, that they would be against communism if it was a realistic threat here , there was no reason to bring it up. I could say that a bunch of badly placed volcanos would reduce competition and they mus…

You're free to disagree with my explanation but it's logical and consistent and I'm happy to continue to stand by that.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#95

Post by engineer_22 »

manyatoms wrote: post #35
quacked wrote: post #5

My 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…

> In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule What effect does this have on the person?

they could have an allergic reaction to red meat

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#96

Post by Tadpole9181 »

dannyw wrote: post #74
TulliusCicero wrote: post #16

> A new pick-up truck that once cost $40,000 now runs to $100,000. A wooden fence post has gone from about $6 to as much as $19. A quarter-mile roll of barbed wire has doubled, from $60 to $130. Everything he uses day to day, he says, has jumped in price since the Covid pandemic. I know why pick-ups have gone up in cost (though I don't think it's quite to 2.5x levels like suggested here since the pandemic), but woode…

Logistics and labor. People under-estimate the cost of logistics and transport. Every inch of travel for any input, component, or the final product has to be paid; and even a wooden fencepost typically moves between at least 5 different locations before reaching retail. Let's use wooden posts as an example: 1. Forest. Trees are cut down into logs, and then transported to... 2. Lumbermill. Logs are cut to size, and th…

Its a good thing that we didn't start a war for no reason that caused the price of fuel to skyrocket.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#97

Post by Tadpole9181 »

gruez wrote: post #77
recursivedoubts wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neat part is that there is no inflation here: you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good.

>you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good. I agree that somewhat distorts the effect of inflation, but at the same time it has to be done for inflation measures to make any sense. Otherwise we'd still be measuring the prices of heating coal and whale blubber.

Because those are our only two options?

We ar perfectly capable of intelligently changing how we calculate inflation. And the current administration's idea that if an American stops buying something because they cannot afford it anymore, means inflation went down is delusional.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#98

Post by IAmGraydon »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #50
jermaustin1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's less clear why those are so much more expensive now. It's basically, because everything else has gotten more expensive. Labor + fuel + wear and tear on equipment + raw materials. Inflation of a single thing, will have effects on anything down stream of that thing. And then there is the "greed" aspect, though overstated, where a company will see that costs have gone up in other sectors, so they raise their acco…

The "greed" aspect is always bullshit unless there is a specific instance of market failure like monopoly power or collusion. This has definitely happened, so I'm not discounting it, but in those cases folks should just say the issue is monopoly concentration or collusion. Saying "greed" comes from people who fundamentally believe economics doesn't exist, or don't understand it. Everyone in the economy is "greedy". C…

It's a shame you're getting downvoted (and I probably will too), but I have to say this is one of the few rational and correct posts in this thread. Most people can't look at markets objectively because they're actively participating in them and are therefore emotionally involved. As you said, the bid side seeks the lowest price and the ask side seeks the highest price. You don't get to judge the motivation of market participants on either side. The price is what it is because two parties decided to make a deal at a certain price level. The seller is no more to blame for rising prices than the buyer is because they were willing to pay it.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#99

Post by gruez »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #97
gruez wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you just substituted a worse product for a better one and our friends in the govt call it good. I agree that somewhat distorts the effect of inflation, but at the same time it has to be done for inflation measures to make any sense. Otherwise we'd still be measuring the prices of heating coal and whale blubber.

Because those are our only two options? We ar perfectly capable of intelligently changing how we calculate inflation. And the current administration's idea that if an American stops buying something because they cannot afford it anymore , means inflation went down is delusional.

>We ar perfectly capable of intelligently changing how we calculate inflation.

What do you propose then? All the places where the BLS is "intelligently changing how we calculate inflation" creates controversy: hedonic/quality adjustments, substitution/weight changes, owners equivalent rent, the list goes on and on. What it practically boils down to is that people have an agenda (ie. inflation is high or low), and if the official numbers doesn't seem right to them, they accuse the current administration of fudging it, even if there's no evidence of methodology change.

Re: US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money

#100

Post by atmavatar »

walthamstow wrote: post #65
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Economist magazine, the global problem is Chinese people eating more meat.

That's a deeply biased stance though, isn't it? It seems to say that USA and Brazil eating vast amounts of beef, the latter clearing the Amazon to do so, isn't a problem, it's only a problem now because of the Chinese.

The US and Brazil have eaten a lot of beef for a significant amount of time, so that had already been priced into the market.

A sudden spike in price requires a change in the market - e.g., the Chinese suddenly starting to eat more beef, wildfires wiping out grazing land, fuel price spikes making it more expensive to ship the product around, screwworm outbreaks reducing cattle headcount, crackdown on migrant workers reducing available labor for meatpacking plants, etc.

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