why has ground beef doubled in price in the last 4 years?

[GIThruster]

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali ... ecord-high

[Diogenes]

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali ... ecord-high

Living in Cattle country I can tell you that a big chunk of the cost spike is the result of about two years worth of drought. Last year, (and to a lesser extent the year before) Farmers and Ranchers were faced with serious problems in feeding their herds. Because the rainfall was so bad, there was very little grass for them to eat. By the time winter got here, Farmers and Ranchers were in a panic as to how to save their herds. The price of hay was going as high as $100.00 per bale. (Big round bales, not those little rectangular ones.)


Even at those crazy prices, you couldn't get any. People were shipping it down from other states.



Farmers and Ranchers ended up slaughtering much of their herds and flooding the market with beef.



Now that things have turned around, there is still quite a bit of lag before they can get sustainable production back to where it was a couple of years ago. Most of them are trying to breed more cattle rather than process them out. They are holding back on cattle going to market just to try to get their herds back to the sizes they were.


That's what I know about it anyway.



Oh, and President BumbleF*ck is inflating the sh*t out of the currency as well as causing inflation through his general bumblef*ckery.

[kunkmiester]

Don't forget it's one of the industries seriously targetted by federal regulations that impact the cost of business.

[GIThruster]

Are there new regulations? I'm all for keeping the food supply clean. I think FDA has good regulations for keeping beef safe, but there are no new costs there. The price has actually DOUBLED in 4 years. Dio may have his finger on the cause. Even a drought though, normally stuff like that doesn't double the cost and it wouldn't last 4 years. This chart shows a different dynamic that's easier to understand:

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/? ... &months=60

That looks like it could be explained by drought as its just a 1 year hit.

[kunkmiester]

I'm thinking the epa more than the fda.

[Tom Ligon]

Its mostly that drought business, but there's also the mandate to make ethanol from corn to add to gasoline. Most beef in the US is fattened with corn before being made into burgers, and the price of corn is higher due to being used as a biofuel.

[paperburn1]

There are a lot of ways to calculate this but back when I was in agriculture, it was considered a good rule of thumb that for grass raised beef that was finished in a feedlot it took about 50 bushels of shelled corn to bring them to market. So your average steer would go to market at between 12 to 1500 pounds. If you discount the byproducts like hide and sweetbreads this would leave you with about 800 pounds of hamburger meat on up. Dividing the cost of the corn at current market prices in the pounds of meat produced you average about $.25 a pound for the for the cost of corn to produce a pound of beef.(50 bushels at 56 pounds bushel)
There are a lot of variables in these equations so your cost could actually fluctuate from $.20-$.50 per pound of beef for the cost of the corn Depending on the method of finishing or raising the steer. Note this is almost double of what the cost was a few years ago.
http://www.agcenter.com/newcattlereport.aspx
This is a very good link that gives you update prices. You have to read it carefully to some prices are in pound ,some prices are in hundredweight, some prices are for finished product, and some prices are for live on the hoof.

[choff]

The whole Bundy standoff was ostensibly about removing cattle to save turtles, quite a lot of small ranchers have been put out of business by environmental regulations. Some would argue the real reason was not to protect the wildlife but create food cartels to drive up prices.

[ladajo]

The whole Bundy standoff was about a Senator hooking up his son's business deal with a Chinese solar company as I recall. The EPA was poked by said Senator to move the cows to make room for the alternative energy deal.