Posted on 04/26/2011 8:18:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Carnivores, brace yourself for even steeper food price hikes this year than originally forecast. The unholy trinity of rising feed prices, spiking oil costs it takes money to transport food from farm to table and increased global demand has pushed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ratchet up some of its 2011 food price forecasts, with beef and pork prices getting the most costly upward revisions.
Heres how you might want to rethink your food intake/grocery shopping to deal with the expected price increases:
Stick with chicken. At the start of the year, the USDA said it expected beef prices would rise 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent this year. The new forecast is for a price jump of 7 percent to 8 percent. And its not like you havent already been paying up, as beef prices are already 12.2 percent higher than they were a year ago. If youve got a yen for pork, thats going to cost you more as well. The USDA has changed its 2011 forecast of a 6 percent price hike for pork to a new expected range of 6.5 percent to 7 percent. Over the past 12 months, pork prices have already increased 11.2 percent.
In news that the chicken lobby is no doubt already plotting an ad campaign around, though, the price hike for chicken remains quite benign: the 2011 forecast stays unchanged at 2.5 to 3.5 percent. If going with chicken doesnt appeal, it may be time to load up the garage freezer with beef and pork; at least you can lock in todays prices for at least a few months.
Steam, rather than sauté or fry: The USDA also raised its estimate for inflation for fats and oils by a full percentage point to 6 percent to 7 percent....
(Excerpt) Read more at moneywatch.bnet.com ...
Good for you and your husband. It doesn’t take but one bull elk to make the money spent on hunting worthwhile. Tuna is great. My wife just happened to be in Walmart one day when they were rearranging, and she got a couple hundred cans at .10 cents a can. The canned mix vegetables are always going on sale. I think we have a few years worth.
I read somewhere that if it was coated in oil it wouldn’t get freezer burn, but i haven’t had a chance to test that yet.
It was among the hundreds of tests I had done during the almost 2 years when a mystery illness was destroying my brain. (Which turned out to be a simple misalignment in my neck, but that’s another story.)
One of the many doctors I saw was convinced that nutrition was the key to everything, and that every person alive was dying of gluten sensitivity. When the tests she ordered failed to turn up any gluten sensitivity, she’d order another test. It was a wild goose chase on her part, but one of the tests she tried did show I was missing several enzymes, and she pointed me toward over-the-counter enzyme supplements. Digest-EZ seems to work the best for me. I tried a couple of other brands, but they each have a different mix so it’s best to try them rather than take my word for it. With 3 or 4 of those pills, I can eat almost normally!
Could you post a few squirrel recipes, please? The ones I tried to cook came out stringy and yucky-tasting.
How do they taste and what do you feed them?
Either sex elk tags for bow season are OTC in Colorado and we go every year. If it comes down to it, we will harvest a cow.
My best wishes to him for luck!!
Vacuum sealing. I’ve been doing it for several years now and the sealer will pay for itself quickly. I found some elk steaks in the bottom of one of our chest freezers that had been there since 2007, and they were as good as the ones we froze last year.
We have a big nutria problem here in Louisiana, and those are tasty as well. Same critter as beaver, different.
That should have read ‘same critter, different tail’. My apology.
It sounds trite, but they are white meat and they taste like chicken. They grow quite happily on a diet of commercial rabbit pellets and good quality hay, either alfalfa or timothy. They love veggie scraps too, but can't eat much lettuce or they get diarrhea.
A doe will give birth about 31 days after she's bred and can have from 5 to 12 kits. Does are generally rebred when the litter is at least 6 weeks old.
There are meat varieties of rabbit, usually New Zealand or Californian, or a mix of the 2 varieties. Another breed often used is the Champagne D'Argent, prized not only for its meat, but for its beauty.
Now about that raised deck garden in this article....cant one just line an area with brick and plastic and accomplish the same thing? Im garden illiterate.
You can, but you’ll run into problems with plants damping off (its when they rot just above ground level). Ground soil is pretty good at draining properly, as are raised wooden beds, but plastic liners tend to force the water back into the soil.
If you must do brick and plastic, make sure you have coarse stone in the bottom of your bed and several holes in the plastic for adequate drainage.
With a mix of raised beds made from reclaimed floorboards (luckily I live in an old area where there is a lot of renovation), hanging baskets of tomatoes, beans and capsicums and two deep dug flower beds for onions, shallots, potatos and Jerusalem Artichokes (and peas along the fenceline) in the garden, our vegetable costs run to about $5 per week for four people year round. We have a very small garden, but follow the intensive gardening rules and always have a glut of produce.
We do eat a lot of salad though and gather from the local parks and roadside verges on our walks - dandelion leaves, for example, are excellent in salad.
As far as meat goes, we buy from the farm. We buy live, and pay for the slaughtering ourself and do our own butchering. One pig will last us nearly 6 months. Butchering and making sausage, ham, etc takes a little bit of effort, but is a skill well worth learning. Every time someone has to cut the meat - you pay for it. So buy a half pig, or two halves, and cut it yourself.
Thanks for the information on the gardens.
My pleasure. Been growing as much of our food as possible for the last 30 years.
Luckily, our neighbour when we moved in was one of those hugely experienced old guys (he was about 80 at the time) who helped me steer round the worst of the mistakes!
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