The “low cost” of beef….

….well, if you import it from Tasmania anyway.

Our recent round-table discussion opened up a number of avenues that the “old reporter” in me couldn’t resist.

One was the discovery that US Wellness, the largest marketer of grass fed beef on the Internet, was importing some of its meat from Tasmania.  (Yes, I had to look on a map, too.  It’s about 100 miles south of Australia.)  Turns out their northern soil is practically perfect for grazing.  Couple that with low wages and low land costs, throw in cheap shipping on boats returning to the States that would otherwise be empty, and you can see what American producers are up against.

A carcass can be processed and individual cuts vacuum-wrapped in Tasmania for about 39-cents a pound.  (I’ve converted to American dollars).  The meat is not hung but goes directly from slaughter to packaging and on to shipping.  The aging is achieved during the time it takes for the ship to cross the Pacific!

We wrote here earlier about southern California farmers finding it cheaper to import hay from China rather than truck it down the road from northern California.  So it turns out the same is true with meat.  That Tasmanian butcher gets 39-cents for packaging a pound of beef;  an American butcher charges about $1.40 a pound for the finished package.  (Butchers here charge for processing based on the hanging weight; not the final product which can be almost 50% less meat after de-boning and trimming.)

So before shipping, the Tasmanian farmer has a dollar per pound advantage or about $500 per carcass!  However, once the meat arrives here, that Tasmanian meat has to play by the local rules….meaning American costs.

The final price tag then for a pound of hamburger from US Wellness is $6.45/lb vs $4.50/lb for Thistle Hill burger.  A NY Strip via the Internet: $25.70/lb; local Thistle Hill NY Strip is just $15/pound.

We knew that conventional beef was already a product in the global economy; but this is the first time we realized that grass fed beef had gone global, too.  The abuses we’re aware of in conventional beef production have been detailed on this blog many times and it can be assumed that the same kinds of things happen in grass fed production.

The problem is in oversight, accountability and traceability.  With hamburger being ground from as many as 20 different sources, there’s no way you can be sure what you’re getting.  We need only point to the current horse meat and donkey meat scandals in Europe to underscore the problem.  It should also be noted that there’s a lot of time and handling involved with overseas meat….lots of places for something to go wrong.

So “buy local” and “know your farmer” should remain powerful reasons guiding informed shopping decisions.  For the casual consumer, caveat emptor was never more true!