Jolley: Are the chickens coming home to roost?

Circumstances are certainly opening the door...and it is a very wide barn door. To continue with the metaphor - straining it just a bit - half a century ago, beef ruled the roost. Other meats were also rans. Turkey was just a holiday treat, the visual centerpiece of Norman Rockwell's art and the dominant and traditional food of the long Thanksgiving weekend. The same could be said for pork; ham was the culinary focus of the Easter table, leaving the industry to enjoy the rest of the year on the back of breakfast meats like bacon and sausage. We ate some chicken, too, but not much. Campaigning for president in 1928, Herbert Hoover proclaimed “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” The ravages of the great depression and the rationing of WWII delayed that promise until the mid-sixties but the poultry industry and General Motors finally came through for Mr. Hoover. Today, many of us have two cars in every garage and chicken has moved from a relatively expensive Sunday dinner staple to the most consumed protein source in America. In the 1980's, beef began to slowly give way to the new meat case items offered by the shrewder and hungrier Tysons and Perdues who began branding their products and cutting that whole bird into pieces and parts. Realizing the time constraints of modern life well before the beef boys did, they were first at further preparation, too. A lower price point helped but, to be blunt, the beef industry was out-marketed. The cattle industry has been stunned by a long, hard drought that struck the heart of the herd. Ranchers have to go back to the early 1950's for a comparable head count. Last year, some prognosticators were thinking we would start increasing the herd size soon, at least shortly after the rains returned to the plains again. The rains haven't returned and an aging rancher population is looking at the several years needed to rebuild with fear and trepidation...more

Yes, they changed the marketing, and they also changed the production, taking the small and medium sized independent producer out of it.  If the feds keep on with their health, safety and environmental regs on the beef industry, the same will happen to us.