Good point on the injected fluids! I’ve even seen “chicken broth” as 15% of weight on some packages. Pretty crazy.

Sorry I did not get back sooner, this just came into my mailbox that someone replied! Sales from Craigslist have been through the roof!! This year so much that I was able to charge $6.00/lb butchered for BB White and $8.00/ lb for heritage. Don’t get many that want live but if I do I usually just go down $1.00/lb. Repeat customers ALWAYS get a better price… For example I sold an 18.92 lb bird, at $6.00/lb that comes to $113.52, my repeat customer (been buying for 3 years for me) got the bird for $100.00 even. I like to keep customers and I figure that is a kind of incentive to come back.

http://meatonomics.com/the-book/

Hi Matt! One of these days we’re going to have to catch lunch and discuss those costs :)

That’s a fascinating article, and it’s amazing that they’ve got the guy on the record saying that they had turkeys left over from 2012. So, that apparently leads to discounts, and then I read somewhere else that there was a shortage this year with turkeys? I’m curious as to what that $1/lb means to the farmers who raise these birds because it seems like the industry controls a lot of the ‘how it’s farmed’ and the farmer is more of a manager of the industrial process. If a lot of the costs associated with this are paid by the company and not the farmer, then maybe that buck goes further. I’m not sure how many turkeys are grown this way though. The article mentions the drop in corn, but old crop was still trading relatively higher than average. Now that we’re heading into the new crop though, prices are VERY low…break-even for a lot of big commodity farmer types, probably less given how wet the corn is this year (so a lot more drying than usual). It does mention higher feed prices during the summer in the fresh turkey portion, now that I read ahead another paragraph.

Anyway, the main enabler for survival for these large farms is just the sheer number of turkeys they raise. It’s like in Office Space (and Superman) when they shave pennies off of transactions and end up with a lot of money, haha. It’s hard to say what their feed costs would be because you’d think that at least some of them are growing their own somehow, or at least contracting it out at lower-than-market rates (again, probably able to do this by being able to ask for so much). Low feed loss would help, as would the immobilization. I think there’s a lot of ‘growth promotion’ at work too, and the genetics are really increasing size too. Arsenics are used with chicken to promote growth (and give a pinkish ‘fresh’ tinge to the meat), light control to influence eating habits/times and I’ve even found some findings where caffeine was used to jack birds up for eating time and prozac was used to bring them down. At least, that was the conclusion of the authors, who were looking for something else altogether via feather meal analysis. The genetics are also going to play into feed conversion. I’ve heard rumors of other practices too, but I can’t say for sure that it’s true. The latest was starving the birds a bit toward the end so that they would eat their own feathers and feathers from other birds to get protein from that source. At first, I thought this wouldn’t work because birds would peck a lot, but if you clip their beaks…no big deal I guess. There’s also the increasing % of whatever the hell they’re injecting into the birds in the processing. Now it’s saline solution, water, or even chicken broth. That’s anywhere from 4-15% from what I’ve seen, and that’s basically going to give them a monster margin on however much weight that ends up being. I don’t know if they always include the giblets with their turkeys too, so they might sell them somewhere else for dog food and make more than way than by keeping them inside the turkey and adding that to the weight. Though a lot of people do use and enjoy those giblets. Anywhere they can make things work without human labor is going to be a cost saver too. Nothing new there though. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it all too, and we’ll never know what it is. I don’t say that to scare anyone, but farms and companies shouldn’t hide this stuff if they don’t want people speculating based on what we DO know.

Anyway, hope to see you guys sometime soon.

Chris

It is time to pay attention to this issue. I am not a wealthy woman, nor were my ancestors in rural Arkansas. They were healthy despite being poor and growing up during the depression. Why were my mother and father more healthy than their children? Hmmm. Perhaps they did not vaccinate their sins away.

We met back at Oregon in 2008 – I’m married to one of your former Arabic students and we have a farm down in SW Wisconsin. I enjoyed your article – we raised a few turkeys this year as well and had similar expenses to what you outlined (well actually significantly more).

I noticed recently that the price/pound that farmers are getting this year is actually $1.01 to $1.05 – this according to a bloomberg article from last week (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-26/frozen-turkey-pileup-signaling-discounts-for-thanksgiving.html).

I would have been interested to hear a little more on your theory about how large farms survive at that per # level. Obviously, cheaper feed is part of the equation – CBOT corn was 6-12 cents/pound this year depending on the month. I’d be curious to know what their aggregate per pound feed cost is but I’d guess somewhere between 8-20 cents/pound. Feed ratio is probably the biggest difference – I’m guessing the combination of immobilized turkeys and extremely low feed loss combine to a big savings in the feed ratio – mine was around 3-3.5 and I’m guessing theirs is 1.8-2.5.

Hatching, brooding, processing, labor and infrastructure all have very clear economies of scale but it is amazing they can get them down to ~50 cents/pound for EVERYTHING. Kind of scary too as you mentioned.

Hi b! I had never heard of a “loss-leader” before, but that makes sense. Thanks for the insight!

Chris

Hi A & T, You’re welcome! I’m glad that you enjoyed the article. I had to work really hard to not keep writing because I thought it was already too long…but then I didn’t want to take anything out either. I plan on writing on other topics as much as I can.

Chris