The cost of bringing home the bacon

The 2012 summer drought is having a dramatic affect on pork and other livestock producers. As the summer wore on with little or marginal rain over an increasingly larger area of the United States, feed grain prices soared in anticipation of a shorter supply of corn and soybeans. Because pork producers are large consumers of corn and soybeans to feed their animals, their feed cost began to escalate at a rapid rate. Feed cost is the largest single expense in producing pork. I might add, the same is true of all animal production.