I’ve heard the figure that cattle require 40 units of grain to produce beef with as many calories as one unit of grain. If this is true, and beef costs only ten times as much as flour, we should be subsidizing about 75% of the cost of raising cattle beyond whatever subsidies we have for the grain we feed them (much of the latter should be reflected in ground corn and wheat flour prices).
I don’t actually know the numbers. My uneducated hunch is that we subsidize, but not to that level. I could also be missing something important in my model, like if the way we subsidize corn makes it basically free to feed to cattle, but still costly to feed to humans.
I could also be missing something important in my model, like if the way we subsidize corn makes it basically free to feed to cattle, but still costly to feed to humans.
I wouldn’t be surprised if transportation + milling + packaging make for a lot of this difference. I would expect bulk meat prices per unit to drop more slowly than bulk grain prices per unit, which is in the right direction to turn a 1:40 ratio into a 1:10 ratio.
Does this make sense?
I’ve heard the figure that cattle require 40 units of grain to produce beef with as many calories as one unit of grain. If this is true, and beef costs only ten times as much as flour, we should be subsidizing about 75% of the cost of raising cattle beyond whatever subsidies we have for the grain we feed them (much of the latter should be reflected in ground corn and wheat flour prices).
I don’t actually know the numbers. My uneducated hunch is that we subsidize, but not to that level. I could also be missing something important in my model, like if the way we subsidize corn makes it basically free to feed to cattle, but still costly to feed to humans.
I wouldn’t be surprised if transportation + milling + packaging make for a lot of this difference. I would expect bulk meat prices per unit to drop more slowly than bulk grain prices per unit, which is in the right direction to turn a 1:40 ratio into a 1:10 ratio.