Vegetarians aside, who doesn’t like cheap burgers?
Americans celebrating Memorial Day this weekend — the unofficial kick-off to summer and the grilling season — have one more windfall coming their way: the cheapest retail prices for ground beef in two years.
Bumper grains crops have reduced costs to feed animals, and cattle ranchers have been expanding their herds. That’s good news for consumers who will see beef prices drop as much as 2 percent this year as annual production increases for the first time since 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts. Hedge funds are betting that the lure of low-cost meat will help stimulate demand and help cattle futures to rebound.
“We’re absolutely at what could be the peak usage season of the year,” said Don Close, Rabobank International’s St. Louis-based vice president of food and agribusiness research for animal protein. “This year has been somewhat frustrating just with so much rainy, cold weather, particularly through that East Coast corridor. Expectations are there’s a lot of pent-up demand there, once that summer weather actually comes to bear.”
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Bloomberg
