Usda Market Quotes

At the 1956 International Food Congress in Rome—one year before Joe Coulombe would open Pronto Markets—the USDA set up an “American Way exhibit.” It featured the first fully stocked supermarket outside of the United States.

The economy was in a state of collapse that winter, with banks failing and the stock market crashing deeper each day. But even that broad chaos was just a distraction from deeper problems that had all but crippled Donnie Smith’s business over the last couple of years. The cost of feed grains like corn had reached the highest levels in history due to new ethanol subsidies that President George Bush signed into law in late 2005. The ethanol mandate worked at direct cross-purposes with the USDA’s multibillion-dollar crop subsidies, which had delivered cheap corn and soybeans to Tyson Foods since 1996. Newly built ethanol plants were consuming more than a third of the entire U.S. corn harvest, wiping out grain supplies, boosting prices, and taking away the cushion of cheap grain that had helped keep Tyson profitable for more than a decade. At the same time, consumer demand had fallen through the floor. Americans weren’t eating at restaurants or buying Tyson’s chicken nuggets at the grocery store. For the first time since World War II, per capita chicken consumption wasn’t growing on a year-over-year basis. For fifty years, the economic underpinnings of the U.S. economy had been breaking in Tyson’s favor. But now that Donnie was almost in charge, the tide of history was going the other way.

The free market had very little to do with the U.S. food market anymore. The USDA, for example, centrally controlled how many acres of corn were planted each year. This wasn’t as completely Sovietesque as it sounds: The production controls weren’t mandatory. Farmers could plant as many acres of corn or wheat as they wanted. But if they didn’t comply with the USDA’s state production levels, the farmers got cut out of government subsidies. In essence, the USDA bribed farmers to go along with its central planning regime. And it worked remarkably well.

By 2011, far less than 10 percent of all hogs were sold on the open market. On Christmas Eve 2010, the open market shrank to almost nothing, with just 2 percent of hogs sold through negotiated transaction. That was the lowest level in U.S. history. The remaining 98 percent of hogs were grown under contract for vertically integrated companies like Smithfield, or sold through the kind of long-term forward contracts favored by Tyson. Wirtz was being boxed in. He looked at a USDA market website that tracked hog sales and tried to puzzle out what the tiny number of open market transactions told him. The sales were broken down by region, like the Eastern and Western Corn Belts, but there were paltry few transactions happening anywhere.

The most reliable pork and chicken label is “USDA Organic” (used mainly for meat and much different from the FDA’s version of organic), which requires a 100 percent organic diet, no antibiotics (ever), and bans feed made with synthetic pesticides. For poultry shoppers, Smart Chicken is a national brand owned by Tecumseh Poultry, founded in 1998 to fill the void in the quality chicken market. It comes in organic and regular versions, both of which are completely antibiotic and animal by-product free, using a 100 percent vegetarian or 100 percent organic vegetarian diet. I buy Smart Chicken regularly. For pork, the Niman Ranch brand is antibiotic free with a 100 percent vegetarian diet.

For wholesale purposes grading is important for pricing of fruit. The Agricultural Marketing Service of the USDA is responsible for the grading standards. These grades are:Δ U.S. Fancy Premium produce U.S. No. 1 Chief trading grade U.S. No. 2 Intermediate quality grade U.S. No. 3 Lowest commercially useful grade