> Four companies - Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef - control around 85% of American beef processing.
> That high level of market concentration has drawn accusations of price-fixing, even from President Trump.
> So you might expect that those four firms are currently making huge profits from high beef prices. Yet the opposite is happening.
> Tyson, the biggest of the four, reported in May that it had lost more than $500m on beef in the first half of its financial year.
Unrelated to this, but I have Alpha-Gal Syndrome, the anaphylactic allergy to red meat, which is spreading rapidly as the ticks colonize every square inch of nature in the US. In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule (AGS is sensitization + symptoms, not just sensitization.)
I think that things are going to get weird with beef in the US in the next few decades.
"Four companies - Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef - control around 85% of American beef processing.
That high level of market concentration has drawn accusations of price-fixing, even from President Trump.
So you might expect that those four firms are currently making huge profits from high beef prices. Yet the opposite is happening.
Tyson, the biggest of the four, reported in May that it had lost more than $500m on beef in the first half of its financial year."
That's not what they said.
The in between you have all the bad from monopolies in the forms of cartels.
I know why pick-ups have gone up in cost (though I don't think it's quite to 2.5x levels like suggested here since the pandemic), but wooden posts and barbed wire, it's less clear why those are so much more expensive now.
It's basically, because everything else has gotten more expensive. Labor + fuel + wear and tear on equipment + raw materials.
Inflation of a single thing, will have effects on anything down stream of that thing.
And then there is the "greed" aspect, though overstated, where a company will see that costs have gone up in other sectors, so they raise their accordingly. This has been claimed, but I'm not sure how much it actually happens.
Saying "greed" comes from people who fundamentally believe economics doesn't exist, or don't understand it. Everyone in the economy is "greedy". Consumers want to pay the lowest possible prices, and producers want to generate the most profit. Nobody starts a business to be a charity, and businesses will always set their prices to maximize profits.
If prices have gone up, the question to ask is why. Is there not enough competition? Have input prices risen? Why are consumers willing to pay more? Saying greed is just a bullshit boogeymanization that politicians like to spout.
right now we are in a whole economy experiment to see how long you can increase margin through price increases and shrinkflation.
Along with the high price, that's one more reason to not buy it.
When I tried to search for the details, I found only that it was a traditionally meat heavy diet.
Poultry and even pork are about an order of magnitude more efficient.
It's interesting how long the market was wildly subsidized to hide the true cost of beef.
Just wait till El Nino hits this year.
USA - 37kg/capita
UK - 18kg/capita
We're not exactly shy of roast beef on this island either - the French nicknamed us "rosbifs" for a reason.
(Also communism doesn't follow the same rules as monopolies.)
They advocated for competition instead of ogliopoly. You decided to talk about a completely different and irrelevant way there could be a lack of competition. Even if your conclusion is right, that they would be against communism if it was a realistic threat here, there was no reason to bring it up.
I could say that a bunch of badly placed volcanos would reduce competition and they must be against those volcanos. Such a statement is technically true but it's a non-sequitur.
What effect does this have on the person?
>A study of blood samples from military recruits, taken between 2001 and 2007, found that nearly half the recruits from south-central Missouri, where Ellison lives, had allergy antibodies for alpha-gal. [...]
>Only a fraction of people with antibodies to alpha-gal become allergic to it, and those who are often don’t realize it. Some react only to red meat. Some also react to milk, cheese, and other animal products that have alpha-gal. The symptoms are so delayed that people often blame them on food poisoning, irritable-bowel syndrome, gluten intolerance. In the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as half a million people have alpha-gal syndrome, but other researchers suspect that the number is higher.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/06/the-tick-that-...
I agree that somewhat distorts the effect of inflation, but at the same time it has to be done for inflation measures to make any sense. Otherwise we'd still be measuring the prices of heating coal and whale blubber.
Don't forget taxes (tariffs) have also increased substantially. Even if a supplier isn't paying tariff's, if their competitors are they can often just raise their prices, or their prices go up due to the supply/demand shift.
The people who sell the barbed wire and wooden posts presumably like to be able to eat, so they need to raise their prices to be able to afford groceries, etc.
Mills did ramp back up, but it’s unclear to me if they used it as a chance to do so slowly/preserve margins. Lumber never got close to pre-pandemic levels.
Tariffs probably also play a role here. About a quarter of US lumber comes from Canada, and barbed wire is just steel with a little bit of processing.
For products with little value add there’s not anywhere for the tax to be absorbed, and no real way for domestic producers to quickly scale up, even if they wanted to.
Less clear? Check your tariffs.
I am seeing way more active paddocks of grazing cattle now as compared to a couple of years ago. The most likely explanation is that higher beef prices compelled more people to try and raise cattle, which resulted in them needing supplies required to raise cattle, and fences are one of those things you need to establish a secure paddock. The increase in demand for fencing supplies, without a corresponding increase in supply, necessities an increase in price.
People under-estimate the cost of logistics and transport. Every inch of travel for any input, component, or the final product has to be paid; and even a wooden fencepost typically moves between at least 5 different locations before reaching retail.
Let's use wooden posts as an example:
1. Forest. Trees are cut down into logs, and then transported to...
2. Lumbermill. Logs are cut to size, and then transported to...
3. Treatment plant. Without it, your fencepost won't last for every long, and then transported to...
4. Distributor location. And then transported to...
5. Store (e.g. Home Depot or whatever). And then you pick it up, or get it delivered to you.
what a pointless thought-terminating cliché
> You're clearly imposing a self-serving moral judgement on other people.
Just because you are the wrong side of morality does not mean they are incorrect
bz_bz_bz•53m ago
"The rancher is selling calves for record sums, but is not better off because he has higher costs. The feedlot company is selling for all-time high prices, but it also has to pay them in the first place. The packers are losing money because there is a limit to what they can charge. Restaurants and supermarkets also can only increase prices by so much."
ericmay•43m ago
At the end of the day as more and more people want to consume the same products the prices for those are going to just go up.
When I see folks really hammering on price increases for products like beef or gas I can't help but think of how absolutely screwed we are in terms of addressing climate change if it involves consumer behavior.
notfromhere•40m ago
Many markets don't really have 'competition'
ericmay•39m ago
valicord•35m ago
ericmay•34m ago
valicord•23m ago
ericmay•20m ago
But if you want to follow that train of thought with that faulty premise, then sure yes we must stop communism to lower prices because the OP says that oligopoly is solely responsible for price increases, so it follows that further restriction on market participants further increases prices. I don't agree with that premise, but if that's your view and the OPs view then it would be logically consistent for you to also advocate stamping out communism to lower prices.
esafak•38m ago
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/07/28/food-fraud-...
https://scijournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa...
ericmay•34m ago
You're going to have to change those habits anyway because even without inflation that has been ongoing since the pandemic began you still have a lot of pressure to push prices higher on beef and other "luxury" goods as global demand continues to increase, the environment becomes worse off and requires further regulation, &c. It's perhaps a head start, but the long term trend isn't toward lower prices regardless of the impact of inflation (for example).
JohnFen•37m ago
Both things can be true.
cousinbryce•29m ago
ericmay•15m ago
Gas prices are a little less clear as it seems primarily the increases have been due to Iranian destabilization in the Middle East and less so tariffs, but gas prices do effect each country differently so increases here in the US are a lot less painful than, say, Singapore.
I agree with you that increases in the prices of both are good for reducing carbon emissions. I think it's interesting to see how folks are reacting to, what in my mind seem to be still incredibly low prices relative to the negative externalities. If we factored in the destruction and harm we're doing to the planet gas in the US should probably be more in the neighborhood of $20/gallon or something (that's a made up number and I'm just guessing) and beef probably should be quite a bit more expensive too. Though I think it's also worth pointing out gas prices are still lower than when Russia unjustly invaded Ukraine and if we can stomach those we can stomach these too.