Agriculture.com
Cheryl Tevis
The American farmers’ share of the food dollar is shrinking. A recently released report by USDA states that only 11.6% of every dollar spent on food goes to the farmer.
USDA issues a food dollar series to measure annual expenditures by U.S. consumers on domestically-produced food. The new report called “A Revised and Expanded Food Dollar Series – A Better Understanding of Our Food Costs” updates the marketing bill series which has been discontinued.
“Only a small percentage of our food dollar actually pays for the production of the raw commodity itself,” says Dick Gallagher, chairman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and a Washington farmer. “I think it’s easy to see that what you pay at the store has even less to do with the price of corn.”
Read the USDA Report “A Revised and Expanded Food Dollar Series – A Better Understanding of Our Food Costs” at http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ERR114/
