Here’s something weird. In its July 2012 Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Update, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced some revisions to previous statistics, including a huge downward revision to 2011 beef production stats from 36,195 million pounds to just 26,195 million. That’s a lot of beef!
Pork was also revised downward but to a much smaller degree—the kind of thing that you expect to happen with data collection. So if you happen to have 10 million pounds of beef stashed away somewhere, please let the Agriculture Department know.