4th Of July BBQ Price Tag Increases

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Market Basket Survey, the average cost of a summer cookout for ten people is $69.68, which breaks down to less than $7 per person. AFBF Chief Economist Roger Cryan said the overall cost for the cookout is up 17% year over year, for a variety of reasons.

“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 another one of the big impacts, especially on food, is the war in Ukraine and the cascading effects from that."

Cryan says despite what consumers may believe, the increased costs are not finding their way back to farmers.

“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.

Individual Prices, according to the AFBF 2022 Summer Cookout, include:

2 pounds of ground beef, $11.12 (+36%)
2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, $8.99 (+33%)
32 ounces of pork & beans, $2.53 (+33%)
3 pounds of center cut pork chops, $15.26 (+31%)
5 quarts of fresh-squeezed lemonade, $4.43 (+22%)
5 pounds of homemade potato salad, $3.27 (+19%)
8 hamburger buns, $1.93 (+16%)
Half-gallon of vanilla ice cream, $5.16 (+10%)
13-ounce bag of chocolate chip cookies, $4.31 (+7%)
2 pints of strawberries, $4.44 (-16%)
1 pound of sliced cheese, $3.53 (-13%)
16-ounce bag of potato chips, $4.71 (-4%)

Cryan said the war in Ukraine is a reminder of the importance of agriculture.

“For the last 40 years we’ve been very lucky. We've seen growth in agricultural productivity, we've seen market reforms in China and the former Soviet Union that unleashed a lot of productive potential and we've seen improving agricultural technologies. And many things have all contributed to food being more readily available, but this one event is cutting into that. It really serves as a striking lesson of how important it is to support productive agriculture, and how important it is not to take our food supply for granted.”

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