Costs Up for 4th of July Cookout

Having a cookout this Fourth of July weekend? We thought you might be. And it’s going to be more expensive.

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network. Well, the average cost of a summer cookout for ten people this year…$69.68. That breaks down to just less than $7 per person, according to the American Farm Bureau’s summer marketbasket survey. AFBF Chief Economist Roger Cryan says that the overall cost for the cookout is up 17 percent or about $10 from last year, because of several factors…

“One of them is the general supply chain challenges that we've had as we've recovered from COVID. Another one is the Federal Reserve Bank's expansion of the money supply which has caused general inflation. It's caused the prices of everything to go up. And especially on food is the war in Ukraine and the cascading effects from that.”

And, on the flipside of this, the increased costs for consumers still not a windfall for farmers and ranchers…

“Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. are facing rising input costs and those rising input costs are cutting into the returns they're getting for their product. In a lot of cases farmers are not even covering their increased costs with these higher prices. Livestock producers in particular are paying higher prices for feed while their own prices are not that much above last year if they are at all.”

Add it all together and Cryan says it serves as a striking lesson of how important it is not to take our food supply for granted.