Worldwide bacon shortage...

nooo...not a bacon shortage..how am I supposed to eat my salad ?!

Blame this guy:



And this guy:

See, I don't get it. I was raised on a farm and know the ebbs and flows of meat markets. The farmers/ranchers held off on selling their stock - pigs, cattle, chicken, but mostly pigs and cattle - in anticipation of the government helping them out with this drought situation. Well, Congress went on vacation without passing anything substantial to help out the farmers/ranchers, so they should be unloading their animals right now. This would mean that the price of animals would be less because of the excess number of animals being sold. This translates into a lot of meat being available and, therefore, lower meat prices.

Sometime around February or March, the price of meat would then go up. This is because there will be less animals being sold, having been sold earlier because of lack of feed. This should continue until the following fall or winter. Why? If the farmers/ranchers kept their cows and bred them, they will drop their calves sometime in the late spring/early summer of next year. It takes approximately nine months for a calf to be ready for slaughter. One thing that may put a cinch in all this is that the farmers/ranchers may have had to sell off their cows. This means that they will need to buy cows and, if they are not already bred, they will have to breed them. Which places the possibility of beef prices remaining high until early into 2014.

Now, hog prices should go down sooner than cattle prices, unless the farmers/ranchers had to sell their sows, in which case they will have to purchase sows, bred or unbred. Hogs have a shorter gestation period than cows and acheive marketable size sooner, so I would expect to see pork prices to go down sooner.

As for chickens, the drought should not have affected them all that much as they don't eat quite as much as cattle and pigs. This may mean that poultry prices will not see such an extreme elevation as with pork and beef. This would be my same summation with eggs.

Of course, when you add in Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels manipulating the market in order to turn a massive profit, anything goes these days. I just don't get this bacon being so high priced because hogs are raised in stock barns and sold and slaughtered in large numbers at a time, so this just baffles me.

I am not that fond of bacon. Too salty and greasy for me. So this will not affect me that much. I eat mostly chicken and fish with the occasional steak.