MILWAUKEE • Thanksgiving is bringing turkey producers little to celebrate this year, while diners anticipating the most poultry-centric of holidays may be grateful that they won’t see much difference in the cost of their bird.

Meat producers have been struggling this year with higher costs for key ingredients such as corn, soybeans and oil, part of why the cost of beef and chicken has risen so much.

Turkey producers are facing all the same pressures, but don’t have the same economies of scale and have to plan a year in advance for the one day a year they count on most.

About 46 million turkeys will be eaten on Thanksgiving Day, about the same as in previous years, said Sherrie Rosenblatt, spokeswoman for the National Turkey Federation.

“That’s basically most Americans having turkey at the center of their plate.”

Consumers will see good prices this year, Rosenblatt said, because retailers will again heavily advertise turkey at prices where they may not make any money on the deal in hopes that shoppers drawn in by the lower price will buy lots of other products.

The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates a Thanksgiving meal for the average gathering of 10 will cost $44.61 this year, up 5.5 percent from last year. That includes a 9-cent-a-pound increase for turkey, the group said this week.

Too much meat on the market, high prices for commodities and fuel and weaker demand from restaurants have sliced into profits of meat producers. Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the nation’s largest chicken producer, is sagged by debt and using temporary credit lines to stay afloat. Some observers worry that Tyson Foods Inc., the world’s largest meat producer, may also have too much debt.

Turkey producers are likewise in trouble, but on a smaller scale because people eat more beef, chicken and pork overall. The slightly higher price for turkey on the table this Thanksgiving isn’t enough to recoup the costs of raising the gobblers this year, producers say.

Major producers such as Butterball LLC and Hormel Foods Corp., which has the Jennie-O Turkey Store, are cutting production to help raise prices. But analysts say those moves are coming too late to help the industry during its biggest selling season.

Hormel, based in Austin, Minn., said in August that it was cutting Jennie-O’s production by 5 percent after its turkey segment saw feed and fuel costs rise $53 million in the third quarter.

Butterball, a joint venture between pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. and Maxwell Farms, shut down slaughtering operations at a plant in Longmont this year, eliminating about 490 jobs.

Keith Shoemaker, chief executive of Butterball, wouldn’t say how much the Garner, N.C.-based company is cutting back. Overall, he said the industry will cut 6.5 percent to 7 percent of production, which reached 7.4 billion pounds last year. But given the amount of turkey meat in storage, it will take until at least April or May to get all that out of inventory.

Christopher Bledsoe, an agribusiness analyst at Barclays Capital, agreed that the cuts won’t be realized until next year because turkeys take about twice as long as chickens to produce, meaning any production cuts require longer to take effect.

“I think that this Thanksgiving will be somewhat lost to the producers,” Bledsoe said. “I think the fundamentals will remain challenging for the processors.”

An aerial view of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch in Santa Ynez, Calif. Jackson has given up title to his Neverland ranch, transferring the deed to a company he partly controls. Photo by (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, file)