You’ve likely seen the headlines by now, your Thanksgiving meal is going to cost you a lot more this year.
But those shopping in Wisconsin will be a little better off than others across the country.
Every year the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation puts out its Marketbasket survey.
It’s an informal look at the price of some of the most popular foods found on the Thanksgiving table.
To feed Thanksgiving dinner to 10 people in Wisconsin is looking to cost you nearly $75. That’s up 4.3% from last year.
The National Average is up more than 18% with it costing more than $80 to feed the same amount of people.
One of the biggest benefits Wisconsinites have is most of those Thanksgiving staples are grown in state or in neighboring ones.
“If you’re thinking about things like potatoes, we grow a lot of potatoes in the central sands. If you’re thinking about cranberries, Wisconsin is the number one cranberry producer in the country,” said Andrew Stevens, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW Madison. “All of those factors are in Wisconsin’s favor. But still, with fewer employees at some of these processing plants and just all of the supply chain disruptions we’ve seen throughout the past 12 months we are expecting to see prices up a little bit.”
It's important to keep in mind, while prices might only be up about 4% this year, the same survey last year put prices up 14% from 2020.
Turkeys in particular are expected to be more expensive this year.
Stevens says you can’t just blame the economy for that.
“Earlier in 2022 there was a pretty large avian flu outbreak, especially in the upper Midwest, states like Minnesota and North Dakota. Which really reduced the number of turkeys that ended up coming to market,” he said. “I think I saw a number that turkey stocks were down about 8% compared to what we would have expected. What that means is poultry prices in 2022 are projected to be up about 15% over 2021 prices.”
Stevens doesn’t expect there to be any turkey shortages this Thanksgiving because of the avian flu outbreak.
Especially since higher turkey prices might lead to some people opting for hams or chicken instead.
