Image Source: Pixabay
 

As Thanksgiving preparations arrive, I naturally find my thoughts veering to the evolution of demand for turkey, technological change in turkey production, market concentration in the turkey industry, and price indexes for a classic Thanksgiving dinner. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [This is an updated, amended, rearranged, and cobbled-together version of a post that was first published for Thanksgiving Day 2011, during the year this blog began.]

Maybe the biggest news about Thanksgiving dinner this year is that the overall cost of a traditional meal is down 5% from last year–although higher than back in 2019. For the economy as a whole, the starting point for measuring inflation is to define a relevant “basket” or group of goods, and then to track how the price of this basket of goods changes over time. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the Consumer Price Index, the basket of goods is defined as what a typical US household buys. But one can also define a more specific basket of goods if desired, and since 1986, the American Farm Bureau Federation has been using more than 100 shoppers in states across the country to estimate the cost of purchasing a Thanksgiving dinner. The basket of goods for their Classic Thanksgiving Dinner Price Index looks like this:
 

Over time, the total cost of the Thanksgiving dinner has more or less tracked the overall rate of inflation. As in most years, the prices of some goods in the overall Thanksgiving dinner basket rise, while others fall. One change in the last few years is that the price of the turkey itself has become a smaller share of the total. The American Farm Bureau notes that the wholesale price of turkeys has actually risen, but enough stores are offering special deals on turkey that the retail price is lower.
 

Of course, for economists, the price is only the beginning of the discussion of the turkey industry supply chain. This is just one small illustration of the old wisdom that if you want to have a free-flowing and cordial conversation at a dinner party, never seat two economists beside each other. The last time the U.S. Department of Agriculture did a detailed “Overview of the U.S. Turkey Industry” appears to be back in 2007, although an update was published in April 2014. Some themes about the turkey market waddle out from those reports on both the demand and supply sides.

On the demand side, the quantity of turkey per person consumed rose dramatically from the mid-1960s up to the early 1990s: for example, from consumption of 6.5 pounds of turkey per person per year in 1960 to 17.8 pounds per person per year in 1991. But since the early 2000s, turkey consumption has declined somewhat, falling to 16 pounds per person in 2019, 13.8 pounds per person in 2024, and projected to fall further in 2025. This ongoing fall in demand for turkey is surely part of the reason why turkey prices have sagged as well.

On the supply side, turkey companies are what economists call “vertically integrated,” which means that they either carry out all the steps of production directly or control these steps with contractual agreements. Over time, production of turkeys has shifted substantially, away from a model in which turkeys were hatched and raised all in one place, and toward a model in which the steps of turkey production have become separated and specialized–with some of these steps happening at much larger scale. The result has been an efficiency gain in the production of turkeys. Here is some commentary from the 2007 USDA report, with references to charts omitted for readability:

In 1975, there were 180 turkey hatcheries in the United States compared with 55 operations in 2007, or 31 percent of the 1975 hatcheries. Incubator capacity in 1975 was 41.9 million eggs, compared with 38.7 million eggs in 2007. Hatchery intensity increased from an average 33 thousand egg capacity per hatchery in 1975 to 704 thousand egg capacity per hatchery in 2007.

Some decades ago, turkeys were historically hatched and raised on the same operation and either slaughtered on or close to where they were raised. Historically, operations owned the parent stock of the turkeys they raised while supplying their own eggs. The increase in technology and mastery of turkey breeding has led to highly specialized operations. Each production process of the turkey industry is now mainly represented by various specialized operations.

Eggs are produced at laying facilities, some of which have had the same genetic turkey breed for more than a century. Eggs are immediately shipped to hatcheries and set in incubators. Once the poults are hatched, they are then typically shipped to a brooder barn. As poults mature, they are moved to growout facilities until they reach slaughter weight. Some operations use the same building for the entire growout process of turkeys. Once the turkeys reach slaughter weight, they are shipped to slaughter facilities and processed for meat products or sold as whole birds.”

U.S. agriculture is full of examples of remarkable increases in yields over periods of a few decades, but such examples always drop my jaw. I tend to think of a “turkey” as a product that doesn’t have a lot of opportunity for technological development, but clearly I’m wrong. Here’s a graph showing the rise in size of turkeys over time from the 2007 report.
 

A more recent update from a news article shows this trend has continued. Indeed, most commercial turkeys are now bred through artificial insemination, because the males are too heavy to do otherwise.

If this post whets your appetite for additional discussion, here’s a post on the processed pumpkin industry and another on some economics of mushroom production. Good times! Anyway, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Good food, good company, and always a useful reminder to me to count my blessings, with no gifts, relatively little ceremony–and all these good topics for conversation. What’s not to like?

More By This Author: