By Robert Pore

An annual event during the Thanksgiving holiday is the American Farm Bureau’s annual price survey of the cost of Thanksgiving dinner.

This year, Farm Bureau found that Thanksgiving dinner for 10 cost $42.91 on average, or $1.70 or 4 percent less than last year.

But this year, the Nebraska Farm Bureau decided to see what that cost would be in Nebraska. What they found, according to Frma McGill of Waverly, who chairs Nebraska Farm Bureau’s Ag Promotion Committee, was that average cost for a Thanksgiving meal for 10 was $42.05, of 86 cents cheaper.

According to McGill, the Nebraska prices were surveyed at grocery stores in Ainsworth, Broken Bow, Fullerton, Gothenburg, Grand Island, Holdrege, Kimball, Lexington (two stores), Lincoln (two stores), Nebraska City, Omaha, Paxton, St. Paul, Spaulding and Stapleton.

The Thanksgiving shopping list, according to McGill, includes turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve 10 people. A national average cost for miscellaneous ingredients needed to prepare the meal is also included in calculating the total cost.

What McGill and other Nebraska Farm Bureau shoppers found was that the 16-pound turkey, which accounts for the largest portion of the meal, averaged $1.16 a pound in the national survey, but the Nebraska price was $1.07 a pound. A gallon of whole milk was the second most-expensive item, at $2.86 nationally and $3.12 in Nebraska.

McGill, a retired farmer, said out that a festive meal for less than $4.50 is a bargain, both nationally and in Nebraska.

“That’s less than you’d spend for an everyday meal at the drive-through,” she said.

According to American Farm Bureau economist Jim Sartwelle, consumers are benefiting at the grocery store from significantly lower energy prices and the effects of the economic slowdown.

Agriculture plays a big role in providing the abundance of food necessary that allows those Thanksgiving dinners costs to be affordable to American families.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 271 million turkeys raised in the United States in 2008, which is about the same as the previous year. The turkeys produced in 2008 together weighed 7.9 billion pounds and were valued at $4.5 billion.

Leading the way in turkey production is Minnesota, which, according to preliminary estimates, was expected to raise 49 million turkeys in 2008. Along with North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Missouri, and Indiana, these six states account for about two-thirds of U.S. turkeys produced in 2008.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the quantity of turkey consumed by the typical American in 2007 was 13.8 pounds.

The USDA forecast 2009 receipts to farmers from turkey sales at $3.8 billion, which exceeds the total receipts from sales of products such as barley, oats and sorghum (combined) and peanuts.

In December 2008, the retail cost per pound of frozen whole turkey in the U.S. was $1.33.

Number of households across the nation, all potential gathering places for people to celebrate the holiday, was estimated by the Census Bureau to be 117 million.

An important part of the Thanksgiving feast is cranberrys. The forecast this year for cranberry production, according to the USDA, is 709 million pounds. Wisconsin is the leading cranberry producing state at 400 million pounds.

Also on the Thanksgiving plate is sweet potatoes, which in 2008, 1.8 billion pounds were produced in the United States. North Carolina, at 874 million pounds, was the nation’s leading sweet potato producing state.

On the desert table at Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie. In 2008, the U.S. produced 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkins, with Illinois leading the way with 496 pounds of vined orange gourd production. The value of all pumpkins produced by major pumpkin-producing states was $141 million.

Other Thanksgiving staples production, includes:

— The nation’s forecasted tart cherry production for 2009 totals 284 million pounds. Of this total, the overwhelming majority (220 million) will be produced in Michigan.

— The total volume of wheat, the essential ingredient of bread, rolls and pie crust, produced in the United States in 2008 was 2.5 billion bushels with Kansas and North Dakota accounting for 27 percent of the nation’s wheat production.

— The 2008 contracted production of snap (green) beans in major snap (green) bean-producing states was 794,777 tons, with Wisconsin led all states at 320,200 tons.

But not all the food ingredients on the Thanksgiving table was produced by U.S. farmers.

According the Census Bureau, the value of U.S. imports of live turkeys from January through July of this year was $9.2 million with 99.3 percent of those live turkeys coming from Canada. When it comes to sweet potatoes, however, the Census Bureau reported that the Dominican Republic was the source of 60.7 percent ($2.8 million) of total imports ($4.7 million). The United States ran a $5.8 million trade deficit in live turkeys during the period but had a surplus of $23.1 million in sweet potatoes.