No Shortage

Our local store seems to have most things in stock; and not like I'm pointing any fingers; but with $12 to $14 a pound steaks and milk at $69.65 a CWT someone is sure making bank at my expense.








And for those that have never seen a king cake that comes with a baby here you go.
When I was young they use to put the baby in the cake; now they just include it in the box.
That way if you choke on it you can blame no one but yourself.

I assume that is a one gallon jug in the picture ( roughly 4 litre). What was the price of the jug? 3.5% butter fat , or 2% ?

Thats a gallon of 3.5

$5.99/8.6 = .6965 x 100 = $69.65

I dont buy milk as you can guess, but I did see a sign in the grocery store 4 litres of 2% /$5.29 CDN. I am getting the impression that your milk prices might be actually higher than ours.
Farmers were paid $86.00/HL for milk of average composition last month here in Ontario.

Around central Florida whole milk is at around $4.35 per gallon.

It must be an industry standard:
Red cap and label = whole
Green cap and label = 2%
Blue cap and label = 1%
etc.

Farm gate was $22.74 per cwt at our place for January.

That there shows a whole lot of artistic ability on that cake!

Let me see if I can do this correctly.
I always get confused if I'm suppose to multiple or divide.

You are paying 5.29Ca /4 = 1.3225 per liter
A U.S. dollar is worth $1.27 Ca
So you are paying 1.3225 / $1.27 = 1.0413 U.S.dollars per liter
There is 3.7854 liters in a gallon.
So you are paying 1.0413 x 3.7854 = $3.9418 U.S. dollars per gallon of milk.

This name brand gallon is $5.99 a gallon.
You can find store brand milk for mid to high $4 a gallon
So yes we are paying more for milk than you.

That is just basically a huge cinnamon roll with icing and colored sugar sprinkled on top.

3,59 a gallon for whole milk here in West Mi.

Not many folks are "making bank" in this economy where the government thinks it owns the money. The milk processors are paying record wages and amounts for machines and supplies as well.

Green here is butter milk. Blue is low fat, 1% & 2%.

Well, you can take your own butcher size steer to a local small town meat locker, and have it all cut up and packaged for ya, and the processing fees to
get YOUR meat back, will be somewhere around equivalent to the value of the live animal when you took it in there. So, just figure double the price of a live animal, by the time it gets packaged in meat form. Now grant it, you can shop around for cheaper custom processing lockers, but they all seem to be on the same page. And ya sure, the huge plants can no doubt do it faster and cheaper on a non custom basis, but there's also alot more trucking expense that goes along with that, to make up for the lesser processing expense. Live cattle might have to be shipped across two states to get to that plant. I know one state is not uncommon. Once it's froze in a box, it might get trucked half way across the US to get to a store. So, basically comparing store prices to on the farm raw products is like comparing apples to oranges no matter what the situation is.
That said, whenever there is a middle man involved, there is always a potential for price gouging, and excessive pocket padding. To say that it doesn't go on AT ALL, is just insane. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, anybody is capable of charging more than thier fair share.
As a consumer in a grocery store, my advice would be to look at the on sale prices, versus regular price. That will likely give you a better idea of actual cost as a consumer, rather than going clear back to on farm commodity price. A surplus of something, is likely to show up in stores on sale, and likely closer to an at cost price.
A large packing plant burnt down in my state a while back. The other packing plants used this as an opportunity to price gouge, when there was no shortage of beef itself to be processed. The only shortage was in the processing part itself. After the smoke died down from all of this, state lawmakers aimed to make it so this couldn't happen, to protect both the consumer and producer. Not sure what progress they made. That's about the time the story fell out of the news, and I didn't dig deep to continue to follow the story. I'm sure others did.

Signing off, Redforlife, one of many US beef producers.

P.S. There was a couple threads on here (or maybe it was Tales) awhile back about shop rates and if thier was any funny business going on with that (pocket padding). To me, this topic kind of hits the same nail on the head. You can't really prove it. But you smell smoke. Sense that something ain't right.

I got a friend that milks in Wisconsin, I thought he said he was getting 21:00 CWT, but he tells me what his expenses are, there staggering,$50.000 dollars a month electricity bill, yes i said fifty thousand, it boggles my mind, but he milks a lot of cows,and he 's got a full time Vet too!

I read your post and understand what your saying. What in your honest opinion is a fair price to have an animal killed, cut , vacuum sealed and wrapped based on hanging weight ? A couple weeks ago I was dealing with this not for us but a family member. Was not one of our animals. They wont be ready for another couple months. Animal came from a neighbor that buys from us. The customer ended up paying 3.35 per pound based on hanging weight. This included obviously the animal, and processing. Vacuum sealed and wrapped for the freezer. He was happy.

redforlife, you go to all that effort of explaining how the supply chain works and then you go and completely ignore it as you appear to accuse the other processors of price gouging.

The processing is an integral part of the... process, I guess. You have live cows on one end and meat on styrofoam trays on the other. When the processing capacity is reduced significantly, and demand stays the same, you end up with a shortage of processed meat and a surplus of live animals.

Sure there is no shortage of beef... ON THE HOOF. Fat lot of good that does the average consumer who thinks beef comes from the grocery store. To put it another way, you can't just bite a hunk off of a cow and eat it.

The shortage is in PROCESSED beef, and it's due to a bottleneck in the processing not necessarily a shortage of raw materials. Simple supply and demand economics apply here. When the supply goes down the price goes up. Demand does not have to go up. The meat processing plants are going full bore but they can't keep up with normal demand, that necessitates an increase in price of the finshed product to curtail demand some until, or instead of, bringing more processing online.

On the other side of the coin, there are now too many live cows because the processers can't kill them fast enough. Again, simple supply and demand economics. Demand has dropped because that plant burned, and even though there are the same number of cows available, that is, supply has not changed, the price has to go down due to reduced demand.

(quoted from post at 13:16:03 02/22/22) That is just basically a huge cinnamon roll with icing and colored sugar sprinkled on top.

Click to expand...

Back to the original subject.....

Yes, have had many.
Usually the frosting job is more refined or artistic.
But then I like it with just a light brushing of frosting.
Otherwise I peel it off before eating the cake, lol.

He may be replacing manual labor with automation. The $50,000 electric bill might break down to only $20 per cow per month or $1 per ctw. Electricity cost less than labor.

Cheap steaks, high priced ground beef but it all averages out and you have it ready to eat when one wants. That is about what one would have in beef here if processed in a USDA clean slaughter house and vacuum packed which is the only way to go.

Yes Barnyard, you can call it an
accusation if you like. I'm actually,
just telling you what DID happen
though. Was I wrong for calling it
(price gouging)? Perhaps. I guess I
just don't know of a (better) term to
use, when somebody charges a fee for a
service, and then jacks the fee way up
when no additional expense was
incurred for them, and then, to top it
off, resume back to thier normal price
when they can't charge the inflated
price no longer. Some people might
call it (just) capitalism, some people
might call it price gouging, others
might even call it Highway Robbery!
What people call it might vary. Is it
right or wrong? That's opinionated. If
given the chance, heck I'd probably
even do it.
Was just providing an example for
original poster, of what CAN happen.
Maybe I picked a bad example, or
shouldn't of included one at all, the
way it sounds. LOL.

That sounds reasonable. More than reasonable actually. I'm sure I couldn't get a beef to a customer using any of the local lockers around in my area, and beat that price.

I know but that figure blew, me away!!!

He should invest in a methane digester. Sounds like a large operation.

Vito

Do you work for jbs or Tyson ?

And nobody wants to work

All i know is they put their manure on the cropland, and they pump it,it's cheaper than hauling it to the field, they put some on the Alfalfa. after the first crop is off, it really makes it grow !!

(quoted from post at 12:14:09 02/22/22) Our local store seems to have most things in stock; and not like I'm pointing any fingers; but with $12 to $14 a pound steaks and milk at $69.65 a CWT someone is sure making bank at my expense.

Click to expand...

It's the processors, wholesalers and the store. $18-19@ cwt for milk around here and the farmer pays for the pickup of the milk. I got 49 cents @ lbs for the last Angus cross cows I sold for slaughter. It's not the farmers raping you.

That's right at what I pay for 2% NE of Dallas. Beef is in the $5-9 depending on ground or fancy cuts, select grade.