Why cheese costs more than meat?

Uh, no, that would make more sense the other way around: you have to house and raise (for years), feed, and impregnate (more cost, risk, feed, and months of time) and midwife a cow before you have any hope of milk;

the meat, from the 50% of calves that are male and therefore otherwise a waste of further husbandry, would be the extra that you get for "free".

 

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That's how they do it in the store...

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But you do have a point. Almost. I looked it up,

American Cheese 1oz or 28.35g is 94 cal

Ground beef 1 portion, 139g is 385 cal >>> 79 cal / oz

So although American cheese has 20-25% more calories per ounce, it is at least twice more expensive by weight in the store.

Bottomline is that your explanation only explains 1/3rd of the price difference...

http://www.thecaloriecounter.com/Foods/1300/23580/1/Food.aspx

 

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You are right, later I realized my reasoning was backward...

 

I am convinced that mice are to blame.
They made lobes and raised the price.

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What do the cheese manufactures pay the dairy co-ops? They certainly don't pay retail prices.

The price I was trying to find was what the dairy co-op pays the dairy farmer.

 

Actually no. When I saw this post I realized I forgot to put an extrapolated meat price in my earlier meat post. I now edited that post and added one in.

The dairy farmer gets something like $1.67 per pound for the milk in a pound of cheese. They got much less than that in 2009 but the savings were not passed on to the consumers.

The cattle raiser gets something like $2.05 per pound for an average piece of meat.

The numbers change and I could be off by 50% on either product. But no it is not the raw materials that make meat cheaper than cheese.

I think it is the business model. I think the cheese makers put larger mark ups on their products than meat packers do and then super markets add a larger mark up to cheese than they do to meat.

I always hear that milk is a loss leader for Super Markets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
If the Super Market Is buying a gallon of milk for $3.50milk and selling it at $3.40 and the dairy combine is paying the farmer $1.67 for a gallon of milk then there is a $1.73 mark up on a gallon of milk for the middle men between the Dairy farmer and the super market.

I guess with store brands the super market gets more of that mark up.

 

Some interesting facts:

"To produce milk for 9 months of the year, a cow must produce a calf every year. Some of those calves born will eventually go into the milking herd; some will be reared for meat; but because it is not economically viable and there is insufficient need for all the meat, the excess calves are killed at birth."

"milk production over time, from an average of 5,410 pounds per cow in 1924 to 20,079 pounds in 2009, for a percentage increase of 271%. Or we could say that today's cows produce 3.7 times as much milk as cows in the 1920s. It's also true that we are producing record levels of milk in the U.S. with record low numbers of cows, and the significant improvements in milk productivity have dramatically lowered the real price of milk over time. Wholesale milk prices (adjusted for inflation) today are about 75% lower than in the early 1930s, less than half the prices of the early 1980s, and are now close to the lowest level in history."

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/fewer-cows-more-milk-powered-by-tableau.html

 

Where did you get this?

Actually, no. I already presented that 1 gallon of milk makes about 1 lb of cheese. True, the cheese maker doesn't pay the retail cost of $3.5, but pays most likely still way more than $2... And don't forget that the $3.5 is a subsidizied price...

So as a start they would be still equally priced based on ingrediens cost...

 

Read post 11. I got my milk to cheese formula from you.

My second quote in post 11 contained this "dairy farms in northern Vermont last year, the red ink was flowing almost as fast as the milk. The dairyman was losing nearly $100 per cow each month because the price for 100 pounds of milk fell to $11, well under the $18 cost of production..........."

But 2009 was an unusually bad year for dairy farmers. They expanded their herds too much during the 2007-2008 commodities boom and then had to send perfectly good dairy cows to slaughter in 2009 when the prices farmers were getting for milk crashed.

Go back to post 11 and follow my math. The farmer may have exaggerated the cost of production but even so I based my numbers on $20 per hundred pounds to give the farmer some profit. That comes out to $1.67 per pound of cheese going to pay the farmers for the milk.