[News] Recession Closes in on Chicken Farmers

[ohiofarmgirl]

yep yep! live chickens!

actually i'm with Miss P - i watched the price of chicken in the stores climb slowly until i was struck lack-jawed and buggy eye when i saw a package of split breast was $12!!?!?!? are you kidding me!?!? i really think they priced themselves out of business.

but if you look at it - all the fast food places have tons of chicken on their menus. you can buy a $1 chicken sandwich but its $10 for a package in the store? that just doenst add up at all. plus, if you watch people in the store they do the "whats cheapest dance" around the meat department until they find something on sale. maybe its the big changes in buying habits as well?

i kept thinking (as i was watching the prices rise) its chicken for heaven's sakes! so now i've given up and am just growing my own... come on ideal ship that order!

 

[Rosalind]

Back in the olden days

when critters mostly ate grass (as opposed to corn), chicken was indeed the most expensive meat and beef was cheap. The reason being, cows will eat nothing but grass, happily, and if you rotate pasture enough you don't need to re-seed--while chickens need grain that has to be grown every year, grain that would normally go to make bread for people. So it stood to reason that one chicken cost as much as several loaves of bread, because that was how much grain they ate, while cattle can be grazed on grassland that doesn't take as much plowing, seeding, harvesting type work.

I don't even want to think about the "chicken" fast food sandwiches. They can call it chicken, it may once have even been in the general vicinity of a feather, but what percentage is soy, cardboard filler, texturizer and cockroach legs, I can only imagine.