Economies of scale strike again it seems, for #2. Cows are big. 20 kilograms is practically nothing and the efficency is low at very small scales. Consumers often operate under the delusion that cost is fixed per item in all locations, at all levels of demand and any increased prices are pure opportunism.
It's not just cows.. it's potatoes too... they pick up potatoes and have a warehouse full of them, you want to buy a sack (5, 10kg) from them, and they offer you a price, again, higher than aldi. And i'm talking about the same farmers who sell their produce to aldi and complain about how little money they get from aldi and how (relatively) high the price in aldi is.
I understand that a cow is a logistic process, where after slaughter, you have to get rid of the whole cow, not just the "best parts", but selling potatos is literally just packing a bag and weighing them, but nope...
Same with apples in the autumn, complain about low prices from companies, then not wanting to sell them at retail price (with two middlemen gone).
Whenever I buy a side of beef from a local farmer, I pay the farmer and then pay the butcher. I believe the butcher deals with the “not best parts” much more often than the farmer does, but I’m not an expert and this is an n=1 data point.
