A meme circulating on the internet, likely started by R-CALF, goes like this: Ok, a 1300-pound animal is bought for $0.95 per pound by the packers and 40 percent of the animal is waste, which leaves 780 pounds of meat. Now take that 780 pounds multiplied by the retail price of $7.79 per pound and the total value is $6,076.20! After deducting the original cost of the animal at $1,235.00, it becomes clear that the big four meat packers plus the retailers are making a whopping $4,841.20, which is four times what the rancher made for producing all that meat. Both the rancher and the consumer are getting screwed. This of course totally ignores the labor- and capital-intensive contributions of the packer and retailer in converting the animal in...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.