Trouble in paradise, national beef shortage?

[Chasdev]

Just saw that Cargil is shuttering a major processing plant due to lack of beef cattle for sale in America.
At least 800 process plant workers are hitting the bricks.
This is going to raise the cost of vitamin brisket for all of us I fear.

 

[uncle eddie]

My son used to work for the treasury department of an international USA based meat producer.

He would tell me about plant closings and reopenings all the time. The closings are often done to create shortages to artificially buoy prices.

I wish our government would break up this mega-conglomerates. But capitalism wil find a way...

My son also explained that in England, they have rules against mega-conglomerates - so the same "USA-based international" company would open like 500 smaller companies with a pyramid structure. With each "little" company owning like 4 little companies, and each of them own like 4 more... it doesn't take too many iterations to get to 500.

 

[schlotz]

Found this regarding Cargill:

Cargill laying off about 8,000 people, 5% of global workforce

The cuts come amid a corporate restructuring in response to falling sales and profits.

www.startribune.com

 

[Chasdev]

Whatever the case may be, I talked the wife into letting me run out and buy three HEB Prime 1 packers, you know the coming shortage, right?
Two for the deep freeze and one for the stickburner ASAP.
I did see something surprising while perusing the selection.. a Snake River Farms Waygu for sale for $140! at HEB!?

 

[cptnding]

Here's a link to the WSJ story about it today. Hopefully it works

https://www.wsj.com/business/agricu...7?st=HdkTxT&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

 

[sandyut]

meh, ive heard it before. likely more to it. I cant grows cows, so I buy the beef at market prices. its out of my hands, so it falls in the i cant change it bucket. wash it down with beer.

 

[Hijack73]

I worked for US Foodservice for 7 years. We could manipulate the meat markets by buying up trailer after trailer full of a specific cut when it was on sale. Order a million lbs of inside rounds, the packers would fill those orders, next month they would have an excess of ribeyes and strips and chucks that they would have to discount to move them - and we would buy them on sale and only pass a small fraction of those savings on to the customers.

Everything manipulates the markets.

 

[Brokenhandle]

I worked for US Foodservice for 7 years. We could manipulate the meat markets by buying up trailer after trailer full of a specific cut when it was on sale. Order a million lbs of inside rounds, the packers would fill those orders, next month they would have an excess of ribeyes and strips and chucks that they would have to discount to move them - and we would buy them on sale and only pass a small fraction of those savings on to the customers.

Everything manipulates the markets.

I'm guessing it's all about that! No big corporations or politicians will admit to it.

Ryan