Beef inflation: 3 reasons your burger is more expensive

Yahoo

2 days ago

Beef prices have risen more than 8% since the start of 2025. Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute chief agricultural economist Michael Swanson joins Market Catalysts to break down the rise in prices.
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Well, move over eggs, beef is the new highly inflated grocery store item on the shelves. Prices have increased over 8% so far this year, hitting $9.26 per pound as of June. That's according to the USDA. Here to break down the catalyst behind these rising prices is Michael Swanson, chief agricultural economist for the Wells Fargo Agri Food Institute. Thanks for being here. It's good to see you. So, you know, I don't know that beef and eggs are directly comparable, right? The egg prices were very volatile as we were seeing them sort of go up and then come back down. What's going on with beef that's causing these issues?
You know, it's interesting, you know, if you think about analogy, you know, eggs are kind of a sports car, they really move in a hurry. Beef is more of a train. It kind of goes slowly. You can see things out in the future and you anticipate that. What we saw was a drought two or three years ago, low prices really hurt their performance in terms of the profitability, and today they're just short cattle, and it's going to take two or three years to fix the problem.
What effect if any do tariffs have on the U.S. cattle business?
You know, typically none in the past, but we're kind of in a new moment right now. We used to be kind of a net neutral for exporting, importing beef. We sent out high-end steaks to Japan and China, brought in ground beef from Australia. Right now, we're 8% of our supplies coming from overseas. So that's a, that's not normal. That's kind of new. So we're going to have to wait and see what this means to the consumer at the end of the day price wise.
Well, I was also interested as I was reading into this, Michael, it's almost like, um, oil, that there are certain kinds of beef that we consume in the U.S., ground beef, for example, that's sort of a different mix that is not necessarily all produced in the U.S.. Can you explain that for viewers?
Absolutely, it's a great observation. So we usually finish the beef in a cow yard, and give them a super ration of corn and soybean meal and just basically they're going to turn pretty fatty. And on the other side, a lot of the cattle that we're importing from outside the beef is grass fed, it's out on the range, walking around, getting its exercise, so it's pretty lean. So we kind of blend the two together to get exactly what we want.