Meat Supply and Surplus, with Consideration of Consumption and Exports

Excerpts: With a meat export in 1900 amounting to one-eighth of the production, the growing of meat animals and the manufacture of the products derived from their slaughter are largely dependent upon the export trade, and the foreign marketing is essential to the maintenance of the present magnitude of the meat industry and of prices profitable to the farmer. Although this is a country of meat eaters, with a total population estimated by the Bureau of the Census at 84,000,000 in 1906, the surplus of meat produced in 1900, as estimated in the preparation of this bulletin, was large enough to feed either the United Kingdom or the German Empire for nearly half a year, or both for nearly three months; the population of those two countries in 1901 was 98,000,000, as compared with a population of 76,000,000 in this country the year before. If such an immense quantity of surplus meat food were to be confined within this country by the refusal of foreign countries to buy it, there would follow consequences to farmer, rangeman, slaughterer, and packer which would be financially disastrous.