Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8187 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Food Prices & Corporate Scalping
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From: Cheesehead
Hi All,
OK, I'm sure that most of have you have seen all the stories on the nightly news broadcasts about the prices of food. I don't know what is going on with the supermarkets because we rarely go there. Most everything we eat here, we grow here, meat included.
But one thing I do know about is the milk prices. And I really feel compassion for people that use milk products. I see that milk has hit close to $5.00 per gallon for whole milk. This is not because we are jacking up our prices, but is instead done by others we have no control over.
Here is what I'm talking about. Milk is priced using a hundred weight standard. That means 100 pounds of raw milk is 8.5 gallons. We receive between $18.50 to 20.75 per hundred, depending on what that particular day's commodities market price is. We do not control that, the speculators do, much like the Wall Street brokers do with stock prices.
So, let's break this down to a nice round average of $20.00 per hundred weight. That is what we get. Now converting what a gallon of whole processed and packaged milk is selling for in the stores equates to $62.50 per hundred weight.
From the time it leaves our farm at $20 to the time it gets to your table at $62.50 there is a difference of $40.50. That is a markup of over 300%, none of what we share in. This goes for shipping, processing, packaging and handling charges.
Yes, it's true that rising fuel and energy costs are the catalyst that pushes up the prices, it is also true that our fuel and energy costs are rising by the same margin. Our cash flow has only increased by maybe 12% over this time, while the processors, transportation and retailers has seen a cash flow increase of over 50% or more.
Simple math will tell you it's not us, the farmers doing this. It's the corporations that control the system that are doing this. By rights, at this increase we should be getting no less than $30.00 per hundred weight, but we don't.
Our per hour income is not even 25% of what a hamburger flipper gets, let alone what a machinist or secretary gets. Out day begins at 5:00am and ends after the night's milking, around 8:00pm. That's a 15 hour workday for us. Broken down our hourly wage is maybe $1.75 per hour.
If we did not raise all our own food there is no way we would be able to keep going. I won't even go into what is going on in the meat industry, but the profit inequity is even wider.
Right now we are jumping through hoops to get all the field work done, but we are still about a week behind. The winter was hard and it still has not warmed up to even close to what our normal temperatures should be. That is going to affect what our fall harvest will be, and ultimately what the food prices you pay in the grocery store will be.
We are all healthy here, in fact I have never been sick in my 22 years of life, but it is hard too. I have friends that live in the towns and cities that are saying we must be getting rich. They have no sexual intercourse clue.
Dad and Randy just finished with most of the field work, starting at sunrise and working well into the night using lights to get the job done. The biggest chore is yet to come, and that is getting the feed corn planted. That's 250 acres, a three day job.
OK, my rant is over. All I am trying to say is don't believe what you see on the censored corporate controlled news broadcasts. We are not the bad guys, the for profit corporations are doing this, not us.
Obviously, this will reach Canada, the U.S.A., and all the other developed nations around the world as well. It has been planned that way for a very long time -- starting with the underdeveloped nations first. The Zionist puppet Henry Kissinger is one of the more outspoken figures on this issue. In fact, here's a report about his proposal (1974) for global depopulation by means of controlling the food world-wide: Link
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Food as a weapon
There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that "population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline," even if such measures were adopted.
A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: "There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion."
