With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
Idc, whatever bad things happen to them is deserved since they voted for it.
Somebody is a damned liar. I know a few different small cattle ranchers (like 10 to 30 cows). They are absolutely making more.
I’m definitely making more. Not sure if it makes up for the past low markets, but it’s doing a lot for me right now.
The details the article covers are interesting, but not one mention of what is causing record droughts and how the industrial cattle industry contributed to the climate crisis. The end of the article made it seem like a return to normal for the cattle industry is inevitable, but it really is not a sustainable feature of our culture.
afaik it’s because the cattle demand more money now for selling their bodies.
How selfish of them, they apparently don’t care about DOW at all
I hear they are unionizing.
Farmers don’t aim for profit on paper… the way the tax code works for farms is they have to be “profitable” but “$1 is profit”. The way to judge farmer success, look at all the “expenses” they’ve “acquired for the farm”. Check our what year and trim package their truck is, or when they last got a new large purchase like land or an additional herd or new tractor/implement and you’ll figure out that most of them aren’t hurting too bad and are loving the cost of beef.
Granted, this is all anecdotal evidence from growing up with and around beef farmers and still keeping an ear on the business. Your mileage may vary.
This ain’t the case in UK, you get taxed on your lands worth, including machinary, life stock and the house itself.
No you don’t. That’s a deliberate misreading of a (proposed. Is it in place yet?) inheritance tax change as being an ongoing tax. It is not.
Don’t believe everything Jeremy Clarkson says, he literally bought tgat farm to dodge inheritance tax and is on record saying so.
In other words, in spite of a worrying amount of consolidation, the beef market is (for now) still a functioning, competitive market, and the players within it do not have the power to unilaterally increase their margins. Huh.
I wouldn’t tell you that Impossible Foods’ “Ground Beef From Plants” is exactly like real ground beef. But it’s pretty good. Unfortunately it’s not cheap, either.
No, it means the monopoly exists at the meat processing step. Owning all the land for cattle raising was expensive, so investors targeted the processing step instead, fucking over both the ranchers and the consumers.
…you might expect that those four [meat processing] 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. Again, it might be selling its beef for record highs, but it is also buying the cattle at all-time peaks.
I wouldn’t tell you that Impossible Foods’ “Ground Beef From Plants” is exactly like real ground beef. But it’s pretty good. Unfortunately it’s not cheap, either.
This is all that I buy when I want something ground-beef-like for cooking. It’s not cheap (not super-expensive either) but it’s highly uniform and the taste and texture are fine with me. There used to be one or two other brands of plant-based “beef” at Winco but now there’s only “Impossible” so I’m curious about what’s going on in the artificial meat part of the market.
Costco often sells Impossible Burger patties for a pretty decent price. Way better than grocery store prices.
Sucks when they stop selling it tho, so we tend to stock up on the things, usually have two 10 packs in the chest freezer
For ground meat, I’ve been going with pork, chicken, and turkey. You don’t even have to drain them after browning usually (more so the poultry, though I’ve found ground pork is much leaner than beef, too). Price-wise they’ve all been creeping up and pork isn’t that far behind beef (even saw a few times where the pork was the same price as the beef) but chicken/turkey are usually a few bucks cheaper per package.
My wife and I cut way back on red meat a few years ago, on doctors’ recommendations. So yeah, we use a lot of ground turkey and chicken.
Not with that huge sponge absorbing all those profits. The middle men AKA the capitalist are not going to let anyone else make a profit.
The capitalist and the farmer are the same person tbh. Most US food supply is corporate farms now, not small time farmers.
There are a great many small time farmers. They are not capitalist. They get by month to month like the rest of us.
Sorry, was mistaken, only 5% of farmland is corporations. The average farm size is still fucking massive though. Over 440 hectares/1100 acres. That’s a LOT of land and essentially it’s still capitalism, the capital being the land and machinery. Like around 4 million dollars worth of land on average per farm. That means the bigger family farms are likely sitting on tens of millions worth of land.
There are also around 400k documented seasonal immigrant workers helping those farmers every year, as well as who knows how many undocumented ones that nobody pays taxes on. So I have my suspicions that most of the family farms aren’t mostly worked by said families.
Farmers are generally very wealthy people. That is the inevitable result of a century of farm consolidations. Most farmers are not true farmers in the traditional sense. They operate large “family farms” that are just family-owned businesses in the same was Johnson and Johnson is a family business. The large number of migrant workers and farm hands they hire do the real work. But the actual guy who owns the land, whose family has had the land for five generations? That is literally just landed gentry.
This is just a long and drawn out way of saying “the meat industry is undergoing a lot of supply-side shocks”
It’s time to trust bust the meat processors to oblivion
It’s the beef processor’s fault
This is one of those points that’s been really bothering me lately. Seriously, pick an industry, and then think about who actually does the work. Farmers, Teachers, Nurses, Construction workers, Musicians, Machinists… The folks doing the work are poorer than they’ve ever been, and yet somehow those services cost more than ever. Where is the money going?
Yachts. So many yachts.
Also bribes, I mean PACs and lobbying campaigns.
Various businesses have been bought up at varying rates since the 80s. It’s basically monopolization but vertically. Private equity squeezes money out.
Despite the dilemma of drought and disease, no one is also mentioning how a lot of our materials that are being used to take care of the cattle are imported from another country. The vehicles, fencing posts, barbed wire, possibly medicine, parts for the vehicles, etc. Part of it costing more from buying materials to take care of the cattle, nothing is barely made in house and if it is, its once again coming from somewhere else to take care of what little product they have.
That’s a whole lot of words to describe what we knew as fact hundreds of years ago: tariffs are always inflationary.
**Middlemen! (Fat cats) ** Ensuring that the producers work flat out to break even and that consumers are working flat out to pay for produce. Ultra-capitalism working as intended.
But they Voted for REPUBLICANS! HOW is this POSSIBLE that REPUBLICANS would make them POOR!
arnt we mostly importing beef anyways.
