Posted on 09/25/2012 4:47:58 AM PDT by Abathar
Might want to get your fill of ham this year, because "a world shortage of pork and bacon next year is now unavoidable," according to an industry trade group.
Blame the drought conditions that blazed through the corn and soybean crop this year. Less feed led to herds declining across the European Union “at a significant rate,” according to the National Pig Assn. in Britain.
And the trend “is being mirrored around the world,” according to a release (hat tip to the Financial Times).
In the second half of next year, the number of slaughtered pigs could fall 10%, doubling the price of European pork, according to the release.
The trade group urged supermarkets to pay pig farmers a fair price for the meat to help cover the drought-related losses.
In U.S. warehouses, pork supply soared to a record last month, rising 31% to 580.8 million pounds at the end of August from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The surge came as farmers scaled down their herds as feeding the animals became increasingly expensive.
In July, global food prices leaped 10% from the month before, according to the World Bank. Maize and wheat jumped 25% while soybeans rose 17%.
Another good thing for me is that shotguns are a bit like ball point pens and wristwatches. That is, the functional difference between the best you can buy and the bargain brands is real but slight.
I LOVE those shows.
Remember the good old days when the big complaint was ‘paying farmers not to plant’?
Of course it was far more complicated than that and the truth boiled down to a ‘cheap food for consumers’ program by the government. That worked for, what, 5 decades?
Cheap food, and poor farmers.
I remember telling a lot, and I do mean a lot, of Freepers that if things ever turned to where the farmer had the financial freedom to opt out of the government programs they’d do it in a heartbeat, and the Freepers would be bitching about food prices.
Now grain farmers are actually starting to make the kind of money that normal businessmen who invest millions, work long, long days, and take big risks make.
At least we don’t have to ‘pay farmers not to plant’ anymore.
As a retired farmer, I think the new system is fairer, but as I predicted not so many years ago, the gripes continue.
Why does it have to be corn that is fed to pigs? How about slop which is basically food scraps mixed with milk. Andrew Zimmern did a show about Las Vegas and featured a hog rancher who got free food scrap left over from the Las Vegas buffets. He boiled up the scrap and then fed them to the hogs who were later slaughtered and sent back as ham, bacon, and ribs to the same Las Vegas buffets where he got his food scrap. An endless cycle.
a few small scale feed lots can do this, but the big ones we rely on for the huge volumes wouldn’t work, the logistics would be too big to overcome. They feed corn and soy because it stores indefinitely, doesn’t need sterilization almost daily and is far cheaper to process than something that spoils in a day. We have some pig farmers around us, and if there was a cheaper or easier way to make a buck by feeding the pigs slop vs. grains they would do it in a heartbeat.
But we still do, which is why we have all of these gentleman farmers who own vast tracts of land and have never plowed a single furrow
There is government money out there in those unplanted field just waiting for these rich men to fill out the forms saying they are farmers.
When I was a kid the garbage man was a hog farmer.
Our uneaten food became food for his hogs. Of course this meant that we separated our food waste from other waste.
This was a good deal for the garbage man. He was paid a small amount monthly for picking up the garbage and he paid nothing to feed his pigs.
We burned our other waste in a 55 gallon steal drum which was hauled to the dump about every other year.
It was a great system. Dumps could be much smaller and it was recycling that actually worked.
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