I would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass weight, plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime. ''And if you're worried about the cattle market,'' Rich said jokingly, referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an option too.'' Option insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.
New York Times Magazine (requires free registration).

This is what commodity trading was created to do. It is also why we don't need subsidies going to farmers, when they know how to work the hedging system.

Intensive farming practices are screwing up our food and using up too many resources. Later in the article, the author points this out:

Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost of growing it.

We should be paying the true cost for meat, but we should also be getting grass-fed beef instead of the engineered crap we get these days. It's not as if beef is the only thing that's been screwed up in food, goodness knows, but I hope a whole bunch of people read that article. If there were demand for grass-fed beef, maybe it wouldn't be the exception rather than the norm.