Most beef and pork prices are higher this Labor Day than last year.
The situation has been years in the making with less cows and pigs out on the farms.
Dr. Jamie Luke, an assistant professor of food and resource economics with Michigan State University, says the beef herd is smaller and it’ll take some time to build it back up.
“What we’ve seen over the past few years is we were already contracting kind of our cattle herd naturally, and then there were droughts in kind of the central and west parts of the United States that caused that contraction to be even more acute,” Luke said. “So even more contraction than we had maybe thought was going to happen originally.”
Luke says that plays a factor into pork prices as well because some consumers have been using pork as a beef alternative. She says it’s more than just inflation increasing costs for your Labor Day weekend cookout.
