You can be forgiven for feeling confused about the newly politicized question of whether your Thanksgiving turkey is more expensive this year than last year. The Farm Bureau and President Donald Trump say it’s cheaper. The Agriculture Department says it’s pricier. Who’s right? The answer turns out to be complicated—because America’s turkey market is complicated.
Let’s start by agreeing Trump to be a worthless source. He never gets numbers right. I sometimes wonder whether Trump suffers from dyscalculia because he mangles numbers even more than he mangles other types of facts. More likely, making up statistics is just Trump’s favorite way to lie. In speeches, Trump keeps citing the Agriculture Department as his source that turkey prices are down 33 percent, but the Agriculture Department hasn’t said anything like that.
The Farm Bureau says a 16-pound turkey costs on average $21.50, and that’s down 16 percent from 2024. But that’s just frozen turkey. Frozen turkey is cheaper than fresh turkey in part because it can be stored for long periods without spoilage concerns. Also, fresh turkey has a certain snob appeal. The price of fresh turkey is up. Even the Farm Bureau, citing USDA projections, concedes it’s up this year by 38 cents per pound.
The Agriculture Department’s weekly price estimates tell a slightly different story. Its estimate for last week showed higher prices for both frozen and fresh turkey compared to the same week last year. That makes sense when you remember that these weekly estimates show how much turkeys cost at the moment you’re buying them for Thanksgiving, not what they’re projected to cost on average throughout 2025. Higher demand dictates that turkeys will likely be more expensive Thanksgiving week than during the other 51 weeks of the year. And it turns out this year’s Thanksgiving price spike pushed turkeys higher than last year’s Thanksgiving price spike.
It gets more complicated still, however, when you take into account that all the numbers I’ve been quoting thus far are wholesale prices. Retail prices tell a different story. At this time of year retailers treat turkeys as “loss leaders”; i.e., they sell them at a loss to get shoppers in the door. If China did this, Trump would be screaming bloody murder! But when monopolization is the culprit—Walmart alone commands 30 percent of grocery market share—Trump doesn’t give a damn. Writing for Axios, Kelly Tyko observes: “Many retailers are selling turkeys at or below cost to draw shoppers in for higher-margin items like wine, desserts and décor—a classic loss-leader strategy that works for big chains such as Walmart, Aldi and Kroger but squeezes smaller grocers.”
Trump’s indifference to unchecked grocery monopolies may have lowered the price of your Thanksgiving turkey this year. Take a bow, Mr. President. But giant grocery retailers cut turkey prices before Thanksgiving so they can soak you for other stuff that you serve alongside it. So if you’re paying more, for instance, for dinner rolls or cubed stuffing mix, as The Austin American-Statesman reports, that’s Trump’s doing too. And to whatever extent the big players are successful at expanding market share, food prices—including turkey prices—will be correspondingly higher over the long term. Turkey production is also fairly concentrated, with the top four processing firms commanding a 56 percent market share in 2021. Market share for the top three—Butterball, Jennie-O Turkey Store, and Cargill Protein—has declined in recent years, but remains a robust 41.7 percent.
What about Trump’s tariffs? Are those fouling up turkey imports? Not really. For one thing, the United States imports hardly any turkeys at all. The few we do import come from Canada, and as best I can make out, turkeys are not subjected to Trump’s Canada tariffs. So if you want to blame Trump for rising prices, you’re better off choosing a side dish. Any canned goods you serve at Thanksgiving, for instance, will be pricier thanks to Trump’s 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum. Canned cream corn from Seneca Foods, the Century Foundation reports, is up 22.3 percent.
One peculiarity of the American turkey economy is how very seasonal it is. Twenty-two percent of all turkeys consumed in the United States get eaten at Thanksgiving, and another 19 percent at Christmas and Easter. Overall, turkey’s popularity has fallen 25 percent since the mid-1990s, even as the turkeys themselves have nearly doubled in size since the 1960s. Pretty soon turkeys may be as scarce as cassette tapes.
And such small portions! The Farm Bureau would like you to know that turkey represents a shrinking slice of the cost of Thanksgiving dinner, because the cost of side dishes is rising faster. This year, the Farm Bureau says, a 16-pound frozen turkey represents only 39 percent of the cost of a 10-person Thanksgiving dinner—the lowest portion since 2000. When you factor in that families increasingly prefer pork or beef for Thanksgiving dinner, and therefore at many tables there’s no 16-pound frozen turkey, that percentage is even lower.
Myself, I like turkey year-round, usually on a sandwich with Swiss cheese, and if at all possible a dab of chopped liver. I will be cooking one this Thanksgiving, and I’d better wrap this up because I need to dry-brine.
Before I go, though, please know that the Pilgrims are not believed by serious historians to have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving. The menu was venison, waterfowl, and, more than likely, eels, and the meal’s purpose was not to affirm multicultural brotherhood but for the European colonists to cement a military alliance with the Wampanoag tribe against the Wampanoag’s traditional enemy, the Naragansett tribe. Eventually the Pilgrims started breaking promises to the Wampanoag (big surprise), and the Wampanoag and Naragansett joined forces against them. King Philip, son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who’d tucked in with the Pilgrims at that first feast, led the combined forces in what became known as King Philip’s War. It lasted three years and was extremely bloody. In the end, the Europeans won and King Philip got his head severed and placed atop a pike at Plymouth Plantation. But that’s not a great story to tell in the middle of a big dinner.
