Excerpts from the report Preface: This report on marketing costs and margins for lamb is one of several such reports on food items that have been published or are planned by the United States Department of Agriculture for 1956-57. This group of reports, issued by the Marketing Research Division, Agricultural Marketing Service, is designed to meet a need for more information on farm-to-consumer price spreads or margins for food. The data included in the six illustrative cases presented in this report disclose wide variations in costs, prices, and returns to farmers, feeders, packers, wholesalers, and retailers who buy or sell live lambs or lamb carcasses at different times and under different conditions. Extreme variability in prices and returns to marketing agencies is demonstrated in the illustrative cases. Consequently, these cases emphasize some of the problems in calculating meaningful average margins and profits.