“We’ve had more ham than at any other time, so there should be Thanksgiving ham on the table, not turkey”, Will Sawyer, an Atlanta-based vice president for Rabobank global, told AgWeb.
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Corinne Alexander, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, said in a statement that she expects turkey prices to be 15 percent to 20 percent higher than previous year.
“Turkey breast is great”, said Chris Wilson, corporate chef for United Family Stores, which includes United Supermarkets and Market Street. I usually do the full three-day extravaganza, placing the seasoned bird in a jumbo zipper-lock bag for the first two days.
“There will be plenty of turkey available for everybody this year”, he says. “25-to-30 phone calls.” This summer, the bird flu ravaged poultry producers in the Midwest, and infected millions of turkeys.
This method only works with a turkey that hasn’t been pre-seasoned-so avoid kosher birds, which are salted as part of the koshering process, or self-basting turkeys, which have been injected with a sodium-rich solution. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the price for the gobbler in Missouri will range from $0.69 to $1.49 per pound. The number of baby turkeys, or poults, placed into flocks in July were down 7 percent from a year earlier, USDA data show. “[Turkeys in] cold storage in September of this year, versus September of last year are almost identical”. While there’s no alarm that stores will sell out of turkey before Thanksgiving, shoppers are encouraged to buy their birds early.
Let’s also not forget: wild turkeys can be totally aggressive and scary. “Our prices have relatively stayed the same for the last 9 years”. “We preorder our turkeys in August”.
It occurred to me that this scheme might work just as well with turkey as with chicken. Wholesale hog prices, meanwhile, have tumbled more than 40 percent year over year thanks to a plethora of pigs. Turkeys range in size from 12-14 pounds to 20-pounders, with prices that range $217-$292. The Mar Vista rotisserie restaurant is offering 10-12 pound whole all-natural turkeys for $60.
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“I absolutely think that consumers are going to see a higher price of turkeys, but they probably won’t see all of it because they commonly don’t”, Prestage said.
