Beef Prices Hit All Time High

Many of you know that I raise beef cattle and some of you may have even bought a 1/4 or 1/2 of beef from me.  Some of you have been hearing me say to "stock up on beef" because the price is going to be going up.  Well, I have been saying that for 3-4 years and it didn't really go up very much. The reason for that is because the drought was so bad in Texas that they all started shipping their cows to market and end up flooding the market with beef...so the price stayed down.  The next year it was Oklahoma who did the same thing...the next year it was Arkansas...this past year it's been California.

So now that everyone has killed all their cows and cut way down on their herd size, the number of cattle in this country is now at its lowest point since USDA started keeping count in 1951...and back then there were only 70,000,000 people in the country and now there are over 300,000,000.

At some point in time the laws of supply and demand have to kick in and the price has to start going up.  It appears that time might be now.

Beef prices hit all-time high in U.S.

Extreme weather has thinned the nation's beef cattle herds to levels last seen in 1951, when there were about half as many mouths to feed in America.

"We've seen strong prices before but nothing this extreme," said Dennis Smith, a commodities broker for Archer Financial Services in Chicago. "This is really new territory."

The retail value of "all-fresh" USDA choice-grade beef jumped to a record $5.28 a pound in February, up from $4.91 the same time a year ago. The same grade of beef cost $3.97 as recently as 2008.

The swelling prices are roiling the beef supply chain from rancher to restaurant.

Norm Langer managed to go two years without raising prices at his famed Westlake delicatessen.
But last week, he reluctantly began printing new menus showing a 50-cent increase for sandwiches at his 67-year-old restaurant.

Langer accepts it's one of the perils of business when your bread and butter happens to be corned beef and pastrami. But he fears he may have to raise prices again, driving away customers.

"No beef, no delicatessen. That's the bottom line," Langer said after a typically frenetic lunch service. "Jewish delis aren't vegetarian, they're based on corned beef and pastrami. Things are beyond my control. With the price increase, I hope my customers are tolerant."

There's more pressure to throw the special cuts needed to make deli meat into the grinder for hamburgers. What's left for Haines costs more. Brisket has more than tripled in price since 2008. Navel has more than doubled.

"This whole thing now is being driven by hamburger," said the gravelly voiced Haines, who keeps years of beef prices recorded on stacks of small sheets of paper. "You take all the McDonald's and Burger Kings across the United States; the amount of meat needed to make those hamburgers is forcing the value of other cuts of meat to go up."

The biggest fast-food chains aren't immune to the price pressure either. Experts say $1 value menus could soon be a thing of the past.

In October, McDonald's said its Dollar Menu of more than a decade would morph into a so-called Dollar Menu & More, which mixes $1, $2 and $5 items. Wendy's made a similar move last year.

Here;  http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-beef-prices-20140406,0,2966247.story#axzz2yLmODzm1

Of course we need to remember what our government keeps repeating over and over...."THERE IS NO INFLATION!"

So now we all need to ask ourselves..."Got milk?" and "Got beef?"