Will they recognize their mistake and move to correct it? Or will they double down on The Stupid?
No bookie in the world would take that action.
I’m not a good gambler though, and I’m still going to bet against Nebraska on this one.
Could someone explain this seeming contradiction. These quotes are from one of the cites in @ThelmaLou’s cite.
So prices for beef are high in the grocery stores and could go higher. But then
Why are the ranchers getting falling prices when consumers are getting higher prices? Can it be all due to imports?
I live in Nebraska, I love Nebraska people and I think you are right.
It will be Great Depression bad before enough of the voters get it and move the scale.
And some will never get it, like the COVID patients who lay dying in the hospital still fiercely refusing to believe in what was killing them.
No, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Here’s a USDA report that discusses the cattle cycle and charts things like imports vs. exports over time. The US produced around 26 billion pounds in 2024, 3 billion pounds of which were exported, mostly high-quality stuff to premium markets like Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile 4.6 billion pounds were imported that year, mostly lower-quality stuff destined for places like McDonald’s and Burger King.
The problem is that beef cattle production is a multi-year affair that like all farming involves a lot of luck and guesswork. Drought (plenty of that going around) and other issues like for example fertilizer tariffs can cause feed costs to boom, fuel costs wander all over the place (mostly up) and apparently there has been massive corporate consolidation in the meat-packing industry that has suppressed regional competition and affected production pricing. If per unit prices are up, but you’ve had to drastically cut your herd size because you can’t afford to feed all of them before you get them to market, you can quickly end up in a losing spiral where the per unit prices you are getting are ever higher but you are making less and less every year as your stock declines before you can get paid. That’s why it pays to diversify in farming - you can become very, very dependent on the money you make two months out of the year to carry you through the other ten months. One bad year or a few rough ones in a row can leave you destitute. Which depresses stock, which drives consumer prices ever higher.
Basically it is easy to get into a situation where consumers are simultaneously paying more while producers go broke. Which ratchets consumer costs even higher because there is less product. But the barrier to steady high profits is a disincentive from most entering the production side. Being a farmer is awesome, except for much of the time when it sucks.
I don’t think so. This chart shows the highest price for feeder cattle occurred in mid-October. The price has dropped significantly since then. Trump announced the lowering of tariffs on beef (and other food products) in mid-November.
But I have no clue as to why the price started to drop in October.
Also, I don’t think that the closing of the Tyson plant in Nebraska can be directly tied to Trump’s policies and/or tariffs. The market forces (shrinking herds, higher production prices, etc.) were in motion before Trump took office. But if Biden is going to be blamed for the high inflation, I’m perfectly willing to blame Trump for plants closing and high prices at the grocery store.
Trump is definitely not helping the US cattle producers. Trump doesn’t give a shit. The leopards are feasting.
A reminder that during his first term Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum were such that prices on farm equipment shot up by 25% or more and farmers who couldn’t afford silos had to keep their crops in holes in the ground.
And they still voted for him again.
I do not remember that happening. Can you find a cite?
Seconded. It isn’t like you need to buy a new silo (or grain bin) every year. Those things last forever.
True, but if you have a bumper crop and/or a newly expanded operation you may find yourself out of storage space.
As a child (late 1960s), I remember a year where some combination of events led to the local elevators storing huge piles of corn on the some of my small hometown’s streets. My memory was a that it was a very year for corn and/or low prices people were trying to wait out, but I imagine that there were probably transport issues or dryer capacity problems also.
Building huge piles of corn or milo is not uncommon. Digging trenches or pits to store grain is.
It was more a double whammy - the tariffs provoked retaliatory tariffs from China on agricultural imports from the US so the crops weren’t being sold (as has happened again), leaving farmers with a surplus they couldn’t shift, which led to high demand for existing storage (driving up prices on that) and higher costs on building materials (via the 25% tariff on steel and 10% on aluminum) making building new storage immediately unviable.
Which meant a lot of crops (and as now, soybeans were the hardest hit) either had to be stored in ad hoc arrangements in hopes of shifting them before they rotted, or just got left in the fields to be plowed under for the next year.
“Luxury!”
I just want to go on record as saying the “reporter has pretzels for parents” crack is USDA Certified Grade A hilarious…
Yup. Cite.
More on the storage price hikes in 2018:
Trumpites who bought heavily into Trump-backed stock and bitcoin ventures have seen their investments plummet in value.
One feels for SimpleMindHatter, one really does.
Word is, though, that the Trump Brooklyn Bridge Trust will be selling shares very soon. Better get in on the ground floor now.