(Radio Iowa) – The Farm Bureau finds the cost of the Thanksgiving dinner has dropped again this year, but is still impacted by inflation and the pandemic. Iowa Farm Bureau’s economics and research manager Christopher Pudenz says the overall cost is down considerably. “The total cost for the Thanksgiving dinner was 58-dollars and eight cents, which represents a five-percent decrease in the overall price of the basket from 2023,” he says. The turkey accounts for 44 percent of the costs of the 11 items, and the 16-pound bird this year dropped in cost by six percent.

“In 2023 the turkey was also the primary source of a decrease from the previous year, but in 2023 that was because prices in 2022 had been so high due to losses of turkey flocks because of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Here in 2024 the decrease from last year has to do with a decrease in the overall demand for turkey,” Pudenz says. He says the cost of the Thanksgiving meal is still well above the pre-pandemic level.

“That 58-dollars and eight cents this year is still roughly 19 percent higher than we had back in 2019 which roughly reflects national inflation during that time period. Now we’ve seen a decline in the rate of inflation over the past year or so, but that doesn’t mean prices have gone down.” He says some of the issues raised in the recent election hold true for the Thanksgiving dinner.”If folks are, you know, still feeling like groceries are, on the whole are more expensive than they were back in 2019, or 2020 it’s because they are,” Pudenz says. He says one thing to note is farmers are not seeing much of the increased cost of feed.

“According to the U-S-D-A, farmers, on average, still received less than 16 cents per one dollar that consumers spent on food at the grocery store in 2023,” he says. The increase costs came after the food left the farm. “The remaining 84 percent of that food dollar that they call it goes to other part of parts of the supply chain, no energy, packaging, transportation, things like that,” Pudenz says. “Food Processing gets roughly 13 cents of that, according to U-S-D-A Food Service. So think restaurants that gets nearly 32 cents of that food dollar. Advertising gets two and a half cents or so.”

The other food items in the survey were frozen pie crusts, pumpkin pie mix, whipping cream, dinner rolls, fresh cranberries, whole milk, frozen peas, sweet potatoes, and stuffing.