U.S. Cattle Inventory Smallest in 73 years | Market Intel | American Farm Bureau Federation.
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So, is this bullish or bearish for Hormel?
DB2
Probably bullish. Because alternative protein suppliers (i.e. pork) can readily undercut beef even with a significant price increase. How much would be paid to the farmer is an interesting question to pose…
Ranchers get very little of the profit. Most of it goes to the slaughter houses and packers. My brother in law stopped raising beef.
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Because people are willing to pay the price.
The Captain
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I think we know meat packing is labor intensive. Not much automation. Messy, not very attractive job. And often staffed by immigrants. After Covid costs are rising.
Also reports that ranch land prices are up–driven by weekenders buying land. Reducing land available/affordable for ranching.
Hogs go to market sooner but some say business is more like poultry where company supplies animals and requires that farmer raise them to their specifications. Not many farm to market hog farmers any more. Mostly large corporate hog farms.
Beef can still be grass fed. Not much feed expense (until finishing) but pasture land required.
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Update: the big 4 now pack 85 % of all the meat produced in the country. Up another 5% since your article was written. They control prices, Congress, air and water regulations for their massive sludge dumps, local tax laws and workers comp laws. Those are some of the reasons I stopped eating factory farmed meats 12 years ago.
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There are places you can get your beef from a local rancher and have it processed locally.
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We’ve done that for years. Better price. WAY better taste.
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This is accurate. 
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Just a follow up on beef prices. We just took delivery on a 1/2 beef. It was 410 lbs. We paid the rancher $1,332.50. We paid the meet locker $395.75 to process it. That made the total $1728.25 That comes to $4.21 a pound. The wife checked what the local grocery store was wanting for 80/20 hamburger. $6.45 a pound.
If you haven’t looked into buying beef locally, I would recommend that you do.
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Wasn’t there some waste?
That was the weight of the processed meat. Average cattle weights before slaughter is around 1300 lbs. So, if there were 820 lbs. of processed meat that would have left about 500 lbs. of waste. I would guess that this particular cow did not weigh the average weight.
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It all brings up memories of long ago when we would buy a front quarter or a whole lamb from Jack Savenor, Julia Child’s butcher. Jack got caught having heavy scales a few years later, but with us students he would always do things like give us the equivalent in ground sirloin for the ground beef portion or some nutty good deal on 10 lbs of bacon.
I found out about Jack originally when I took over managing the Osteology Lab at the Peabody Museum and discovered the blood freezer was full of meat with one of the other grad students name on it.
Probably the best meat I have had in my entire life.
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