The drought. They sold off their stock, they're now rebuilding their herds, keeping them off the market.
It'll come back down.
I was not the draught, that was the excuse.
The price was not high enough to cover the feed lot costs, (pre slaughter fatten up).
The wholesalers had to curtail operations until the price came up which caused a ripple effect all the way to the producers who cut their stocks back. They had to... The feed lots would not buy them.
Within two years, prices elevated due to lack of supply to what you see today.
The same is true for poultry. But they blamed that on a virus....
So lets take a look a pork....
OH! what a surprise! Another virus!
This is what occurs when government gets it’s grimy hands into the markets...In these cases it was corn prices.
Over the following years they have made adjustments, but the prices will never go back down except for the occasional over supply and even those are better controlled now....so no...prices are not going back to what was a 50 year normal until production costs return to normal and that’s not gonna happen.
You also have horses and other domestic animals suffering because the owners can’t afford to feed them the supplements they need because hays generally don’t provide enough nutrients, and those that do are in short supply.
It all started with corn prices, was aggravated again by the recession and now it’s made adjustments in terms of numbers, and newly created diets that don’t have corn.
I don’t know if you remember, but this effect went global. There were people who could not afford the luxury of their normal corn based diets. There were some riots, much hand wringing... The reason was that the mandated to use X amount of corn for ethanol had kicked in and this left a export shortage.
The moral of the story is:
Other than it’s normal and expected regulatory interferences intended to make markets better, the government has no business creating markets and that is what they did when they created the market for ethanol.
It’s a fake, government created market with no apparent positive effect. in fact, all of the effects have been negative.