Mon, 29 Nov 2004

Mad cow takes bite from exports

One could logically ask "Dave, you don't export any beef, right? So how does the collaspe of the export market hurt you?"

All that beef that isn't going to Europe and Japan has to go somewhere, eh? And that means somewhere locally, forcing prices paid in markets way down. Mercifully, most of the saving have not been passed on to consumers by the big packing houses, but some of them have. And the law of supply and demand is pretty inexorable: more supply = lower prices. So I've had to lower my expected prices on my beef, and step up my efforts to get consumers to know the difference between naturally raised, grass fed cows and feedlot beef. Which means additional advertising, which raises my costs in a time of declining prices. Wonderful stuff.

In the year since the first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. was announced, the nation's $3.4 billion beef export market has virtually collapsed, taking with it more than $272 million of Colorado's largest agricultural export market.

(link) [Denver Business Journal]

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