Your Thanksgiving meal will be more expensive this year. Sweet potatoes are up 3 cents a pound. A pound of turkey costs 18 cents more a pound this year. Add up the rest of the typical Thanksgiving meal and you get the highest increase in food costs since the Missouri Farm Bureau started keeping track in 1987.

“We were really right in line with, but a little bit cheaper than the national average, which was $1.19 (a pound),” said Missouri Farm Bureau spokesman Diane Olson. “Everything else went up with the exception of milk, which we use as one of our beverages.”

Even though Thanksgiving will cost more, eating at home is still cheaper than eating out.

“If you look at the papers publishing the Thanksgiving Day menus that you can go out and it obviously is less expensive,” Olson said. “You’ve some of your own sweat equity involved in it.”

In the Midwest the average Thanksgiving meal will cost $44.57, that’s 7 cents more than in Missouri. All of the items: a 16-pound turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, carrot and celery sticks, peas, rolls, two pumpkin pies with whipped cream, coffee and a gallon of milk were pre-made and estimated to feed 10 people. If you want to cut costs, consider making some of the items from scratch.

“The other thing is how much man power you’re willing to put into the product,” Olson said. “If you’re going to have carrots and celery sticks, if you’re willing to do some of the labor yourself and you buy the raw product and prepare it then you’ve got a lesser cost.”

download or listen to Aurora Meyer’s story here.