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Meat: A Tasty Investment Opportunity

If grain prices rise, people do not eat more meat; just the opposite, you need many pounds of grain to grow one pound of meat, if you cannot afford grain to eat, you certainly cannot afford meat (if steel costs too much to market Volkswagens, do people buy more HumVees?)

Cows and hogs can get fat on sorghum (milo) , corn, oat, wheat, rice, ground up cotton seeds, even watermelon if you split the rind, as cows are too stupid to open a watermelon; pigs can open anything if there is food inside. So it does not matter which grains are in short supply; usually the cheapest grains work well. Cows and pigs can eat almost anything and turn it into meat, but great taste comes from interstitial fat, and fat production takes a litttle more protein and a lot more carbs than hay or grass; hence feedlots. And feedlots = grain consumption. So things in the meat business have radically changed in the last 2 or 3 years; the price of tasty meat has gone up because the cost of grain has gone up. You might want to ask which countries can grow cheap grain to figure out which country will export tasty meat. The flavor is in the fat, fat takes grain, lean meat does not pay to export. The cheapest grain producer = the most profitable meat exporter.


On Apr 14 10:00 AM Gonzalo wrote:

> and if grain prices spike, people will be
> forced to shift from grains to meat. I'm not sure in what proportions
> grain prices harm meat consumption. I think it will depend on which
> grains rise.