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Comment by atticora | Hacker News Reader

The demand for beef has gone up faster than inflation lately. I've bought half of a cow in the southwest US for the last few years:

  2021: $950
  2022: $1250
  2023: $1950

That's going to work out to around $10/pound of meat/bone/fat delivered this year, and most of it is ground beef. (Though excellent ground beef with my preferred fat content.) I've shopped around and this isn't just my rancher, but the whole grass-fed beef market. This has probably priced me out of the market after this year. I would appreciate some demographic induced demand reduction to make it more affordable.

Either way I'm shopping for rabbit hutches.

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> but the whole grass-fed beef market.

1) I'm sure you know, but "grass-fed" does not mean "grass-finished".

Most of those "grass fed" farms still do a final bulk with corn (which, honestly, defeats the whole point of "grass-fed"). The monetary incentive to bulk on corn is simply massive (the animal winds up like 3x the weight).

2) The biggest problem for boutique farming (like "grass-finished") is the lack of consistent order volume.

The big farms amortize the price of feed, the price of butchering, etc. over a consistent and continual number of cows. Boutique farms suffer all these and gain none of the scaling.

I have tried to get my local "grass finished" to start marketing to all the "Froofy Diet Types" (for example: Gundry Anti-Lectin which is anti-Corn) which would dramatically increase their volume. Unfortunately, the political overlap between those who produce grass-fed cows and those who consume "Froofy Diets" tends to be a null set--creating a set of attendant problems.

In this case I know the rancher and the processor, and they both can confirm that these cattle are purely grass fed. Since this was a dry year, that cost a painful amount of alfalfa in addition to forage, which contributed a lot to the price.

This is about the best life a stock animal can have. They are born and raised on the range. A couple of times in their life they are moved in a trailer from one section to another. And on the last day they go the processor and get put down very suddenly. So greater than 99.9% of their lives are spent on wild lands with little interference.

Here's another way buying in bulk is different: The rancher texted me a picture of the cow I was getting. Safeway doesn't do that.

> Since this was a dry year, that cost a painful amount of alfalfa in addition to forage, which contributed a lot to the price.

Yeah, that's the problem with "grass finished". Corn is super cheap while grass and alfalfa can be expensive.

Baby boomers still control over half of the wealth in the US, despite being around 20% of the population. And, as you said, beef prices are very high now. So it really doesn't seem odd that younger people would eat less of something they're being priced out of. And that's not too far off from the 14% eating half the beef figure.

Unfortunately, it's not just beef. Chicken prices are up there too. Restaurant prices for wings are well over a dollar per wing now, and they run something like $4/lb at grocery stores. I remember more like $1/lb in the 90s, and $0.25/wing specials at restaurants. 4x+ price, and median household income has maybe doubled, if that.

I would argue that these prices are still toolow because they neglect important externalities of these industries. A large majority US agriculture is fed to animals for us to eat. This directly contributes to habitat destruction, pesticide use, etc.

In 2011 I signed up for a 10lb/month meat share from a local small farm. It's the usual happy animals type of affair. The meat (beef, chicken, and pork) tastes noticeably better than standard grocery store options.

This thread made me look up pricing, as I knew it hadn't gone up much. In 2011 I was paying $88/mo, so $8.80/lb. Today I'm paying $110/mo, $11.00/lb. An inflation calculator says that $88 in 2011 is $122.70 today, so from that perspective we're ahead of the game. And as this thread is pointing out, a lot of standard meat options have increased in price at a rate higher than inflation.

Similarly, when eggs were getting price gouged a few years back I noticed that both this farm as well as the vendors at the local farmers market who sold eggs kept their prices stable.

I hadn't thought about it before tonight but things like higher end meat & farmers markets are often more expensive options than going to the local supermarket, it might not be as much as people think due to things like this.

How does one sign up for a "meat share"? I'm guessing it's word of mouth/local only like you said, nothing online?

Not like I'd quite know what to do with 95% of the random parts of a dead animal other than a few typical/popular cuts...

I think I came across it online. There's a number of them near where I live. Small farms that do most of their business via farmers markets and setups like mine. I just googled "meat csa near me" and it turned up a bunch of stuff for instance.

One thing that puts people off is a lot of these setups you get a heavy percentage of things like ground meat, sausage, etc. Which makes sense when you think about it, there's a lot of "extra" after breaking down the key cuts. People go in expecting it's going to be all expensive cuts, but alas. The one I'm in rotates in premium cuts here and there. For instance over the last 2 months I've wound up with about 4 pounds worth of ribeye. But hadn't had anything like that for a while before that.

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