Lamb meat will be at least 30% more expensive this year compared to 2022. This is after last year we had the most expensive Easter in the last 18 years.
Prices have gone up on almost everything in the past year, and the bad news just keeps coming.
A Romanian producer has announced what the price per kilogram will be at the farm gate.
If last year, for a lamb from the farm, the price was 30-35 lei per kilogram, this year it will be 40-45 lei.
For a 15-kilogram lamb, Romanians will pay between 600 and 675 lei.
Alexandru Paşaniuc, a sheep breeder from Ţibăneşti commune, Iași county, explained the causes of price increases and the risks of supermarkets starting to turn to imported meat, due to the high prices of Romanian producers.
“We tend to buy elsewhere because it’s cheaper”
“First of all, we could start with last year’s fuel price hike. Because if diesel was more expensive in the summer, when we had the hay harvest, and cereals had high prices in the fall, that led to an increase in the price of lamb meat.
I couldn’t tell you (no supermarket price). They decide what percentage they will add and whether they will take more lambs from Romania or not. We tend to buy everything else because it’s cheaper, but I don’t know what quality is going to be found elsewhere.
Because there are still breeders (no Romanians) who give natural food to the animals. We are few and effectively, if you don’t inflate the prices a little to cover the expenses, you get to 0, you either give up or you go to industrialization, when you put a chemical in the feed and growth enhancers so that the lamb grows a lot faster in a short period of time. What I don’t want to do, I better leave.
We are only supported at breed improvement grant level. But we have nothing else. We can prove that we only give the animals a natural product and do not intervene with any other addition in the animals’ nutrition in order to have a much more intensive growth”, said the farmer, appropriately Antena3.
