Excerpt from Retail Meat Prices in Perspective The beef cattle industry is at a critical point in the current cattle inventory cycle. Producers sustained heavy financial losses during most of the last 4 years as their costs held at relatively high levels while cattle prices were low. These losses, combined with droughts in many areas of the United States, caused a large reduction of the cattle herd. That reduction provided consumers with record large beef supplies at relatively low prices. The total cattle inventory was reduced from 132 million head in 1975 to million on January 1, 1978. A further reduction is expected this year. Initially, a herd sell-off increases beef supplies; sustained, it lowers the calf crop and resulting beef supplies. Beef production is now declining and beef prices are rising. This is putting producers back into a favorable financial situation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

When grocery stores began using electronic scanners to capture prices paid for meat, it was assumed that the livestock industry could capitalize on having these point-of-sale data available as a measure of the value of its products. This report compares scanner price data (SPD) with publicly available data collected. Of the two data types, SPD provide more info. about retail meat markets, including a wider variety of meat-cut prices, multiple measures of an average price, the volume of sales, and the relative importance of discounted prices. The SPD sample, however, is not statistically drawn, and complicated processing requirements delay its release, which makes SPD less useful than other data for analyzing current market conditions. Illus.