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For those of us that don’t care about either the Seahawks or the Patriots when they face off Sunday for Super Bowl 60, we’ll be focused on two things: the commercials and, more importantly, the food!
“We have chicken wings, cheese, chips, pizza, guacamole, and all different kinds of snacks that Americans will eat this Sunday,” says Farm Bureau economist Faith Parum. “And those are coming from farmers and ranchers across all of our 50 states and Puerto Rico, and so that’s really helping show the diversity and strength of US American ag.”
Parum says Super Bowl Sunday is consistently one of the highest demand days for food across the U.S.
However, as folks come together to watch the big game, it’s important to remember that the farmers supplying the spread face rising production costs and tight margins.
“A lot of farmers and ranchers across the system and the country are not making money. We can think about corn and wheat farmers who are projected to lose money per acre, and that continues across specialty crop growers like potatoes, tomatoes, avocados– and so all of this is really showing the financial strain on the farm economy.”
Something that many consumers don’t realize is that farmers receive only a small share of every food dollar spent at grocery stores.
“They received about 15.9 cents for every dollar spent on food,” Parum explains. “The rest of that dollar spent went to things like marketing costs, processing, transportation, and so even though there’s strong demand around the Super Bowl for U.S. ag products, not all of that is going to the farmers, and so financial pressure is continuing to build for farmers and ranchers across the country.”
According to the National Chicken Council, Americans are projected to eat 1.48 billion chicken wings on Sunday. If you lay them end to end, they’d stretch roughly 27 times from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, to Lumen Field in Seattle, Washington.
Source: NAFB News Service