Thread: The price of meat these days is a joke.

Originally Posted by Black Rabbit

$5.80 a kilo is your costs, or a price you were happy to let those meats go?

My costs of raising beef are of little concern to the works, or the supermarkets!!!

$5.80/kg was what the beef processing plant paid me. 'On the hook' means carcass hanging on the weigh scale hook with no guts inside, no head and no hide. So almost all bones are included in the weight.

Very roughly, a live beef animal that weighs 500kg will weigh about 250kgs 'on the hook', and if you removed every bone from every cut, the meat left would be about 125kgs.

To get a 500kg beef animal (too small to really be viable at the works, steers need to be 650-700kgs) you need to keep a mum (600kg cow) alive on your property eating 16-25 kgs of dry matter each and every day of the year, then its calf on the farm for 1.5 years eating 5-20 kgs of dry matter a day, dose it with minerals 3-4 times, a worm or two, hope it doesn't die, then sell it and get $1600ish. If it was a dry year, it may have eaten silage to the tune of $600 (lost revenue).

Then try paying a mortgage, avoid like the plague hiring anyone to assist you as generally they are more hassle than they are worth, pay exorbitant costs of having fert applied, mending your own tractor etc etc etc, Regional council rates, district council rates and on it goes.

Meat based protein continues to be rorted by the pack houses and the conglomerate supermarkets.