Why does pork cost less than beef?

Different cuts of meat will cost more based upon their quality, like fat, bone, and tenderness. Demand and availability also come into play.

What kind of food a cow eats is limited compared to the slop you can feed a pig.
I once heard that you could put 2 pigs in a pen, one pig in front of the other for the time it takes to grow them and fatten them up for market, feed the front pig and the pig in the rear will get fatter faster eating the shit of the pig in front.
Pigs grow much faster than cows, too.

You can cram more pigs into a factory farm warehouse than you can cows.

My guess is, pigs are easier to feed and take care of than cows. It’s also easier to get qualitative pork meat than qualitative beef meat.
Therefore, you can produse more pigs than cows while putting the same effort and money. Bigger amount of the product = lower prise.

Compared to cows, swine are much more efficient in converting their feed into meat. Also pigs do not take up as much space as cattle. All this boils down to the cost to produce a pound of pork is less than it is for beef.

All of these are the same answer. Pound for pound there’s a lot less money tied up in pork than in beef.

Also, take a look at breeding. You take care of a cow and a bull, you get a calf a year, maybe a set of twins, but not likely.
Pigs produce eight to fourteen young per birth cycle. Easily renewable supply.

Economics 101 in two minutes (someone please time me):

The price of an item is determined by supply and demand.

We can plot supply as a function of price. The x axis is the price and the y axis is the amount that could be produced for the price. The amount produced is zero for price zero and increases as price increases.

We can lay the demand curve on top of the supply curve. The demand curve is how much people would buy at a given price. It is infinite (or at least very high) at price zero. As the price increases the amount that could be sold at that price decreases.

At some point, the curves intersect. Under free market conditions, the intersection is the price at which the item is sold.

What the others here have talked about is why the supply curve for pork is lower than for beef. It may also be that the demand curve for pork is also lower than for beef, meaning that for the same price, people prefer beef to pork. Which would you prefer?

Correction – The supply curve is higher for a given price than the beef curve, meaning that more pork can be produced for the same price.

In intuitive terms, supply is the amount available and demand is how much people want it. Price goes up if there is less available or if people want it more.

Beef has a better PR campaign, and doesn’t have two major religions abstaining from it.

The number of people who are willing to shell out for steak far outnumber the Hindu and vegans who avoid it.

Correction 2 – I should not do this first thing in the morning.

Quantity is on the x axis and price is on the y axis. The supply curve for pork is lower than for beef, meaning that the cost of producing it is less than for beef for a given quantity. I suspect that the demand curve for pork is also lower than for beef, meaning that for a given quantity the price that people would be willing top pay for pork less than that for beef. Both of these effects would cause the price of pork to be lower.

I invite people to see this for themselves by drawing simple straight line curves for supply and demand. Make sure that the supply curve starts at 0 and slopes upward and the demand curve starts high and slopes downward. The x axis is quantity and the y axis is price. Drawing a new supply under the first causes the intersection to move to the right on the demand curve, giving higher quantity and lower price. Drawing a second demand curve below the first one causes the intersection with the supply curve to be to the left, giving a smaller quantity and lower price.

@LostInParadise Don’t forget the interesting supply effect of high demand for bacon.

A pig raised to harvest the high demand/high return bacon leaves a lot of extra pork to sell off.

The real interesting thing has been the increase in consumption of chicken