| OCR Text |
Show The Missing $L60 other 424 pounds of meat were mostly most-ly cuts that sell at lower prices than T-bone. T-bone. Chuck steaks and roasts, ground beef, shanks, short ribs, and stew meat are good examples. If you average out all the hamburger ham-burger at, let's say 84 cents a pound, the T-bone at $2.00 a pound, and all other cuts at various prices, you come out with $1.40 per pound. That's why the price the farmer receives per pound of live animal is so far from the price the consumer pays for meat in the supermarket. But then again, the conveniently packaged, ready-to-cook cuts of meat you buy in the supermarket are a far cry from that 1,000-pound live animal. (Based on special material from Larry Duewer. Commodity Economics Division "Farm-retail price spreads" may sound like gobbledygook to you, but they do exist and your grocery bill reflects them. For example, if you bought a T-bone T-bone steak at $2.00 a pound, a large part of what you paid falls between the farmer and your shopping bag. The farmer received only about 40 cents a pound for that steer from whence your T-bone came. Why the gap? That's where farm-retail farm-retail price spreads come into the picture. pic-ture. There are a lot of costs involved in transforming the animal on the hoof into steaks and other cuts in your supermarket. Your T-bone starts out as part of a live animal usually about a 1,000-pound 1,000-pound steer. When the farmer sells the steer, let's say he gets 40 cents a pound or $400. Then the animal goes tothe packer and is dressed out to a 620-pound carcass. car-cass. Not including any value added by the packer's services, the carcass is now worth 64.5 cents a pound. The carcass must be cut and packaged for retailing, however. By the time some bone and fat are removed and some moisture and meat are lost during the process, only about 440 pounds of salable meat are left. This meat now has a value of about 91 cents a pound. Processing, transportation, and marketing costs also have to be I figured! Add to that 91 cents per pound about 8 cents for slaughtering; slaughter-ing; 4 cents for transportation from slaughter house to retail store; another 21 cents for labor to cut the carcass into retail cuts and package it for sale; about 5 cents for packaging material; and about 2 cents for advertising. adver-tising. Add on a little profit for each of the firms along the line and you come up with a figure of about $1.40 a pound for the 440 pounds of usable meat. But how did that T-bone get up to $2.00 a pound? Well, that steer we started with produced a mere 16 pounds of T-bone T-bone steak in the first place. The 1,000 lb. STEER 620 IbT CARCASSN) 440 lb. RETAIL CUTS : 16 lb. T-BONE |
