Farmers Having To Destroy Massive Amounts Of Food - Shortages To Come

While Thousands Of Americans Need Food, Nation’s Largest Farms Are Destroying Millions Of Pounds Of Fresh Goods That They Can No Longer Sell

After the unprecedented floods in 2019 and the resulting destruction of millions of acres of agriculture land, farmers are facing another devastating threat.

With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms dump thousands of gallons of milk, smash millions of eggs, and plow acres of fresh vegetables that they can no longer sell. 

An impressive pandemic food waste! 

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits.

An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions.

And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering:

• The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day.
• A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand.

But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.

HERE COME FOOD SHORTAGES!

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork processor, said on Sunday it will shut a U.S. plant indefinitely due to a rash of coronavirus cases among employees and warned the country was moving “perilously close to the edge” in supplies for grocers.

Slaughterhouse shutdowns are disrupting the U.S. food supply chain, crimping availability of meat at retail stores and leaving farmers without outlets for their livestock.

You cannot stock grocery shelves if there is no plant running to stock them with.

The hog does not stop growing if you don't harvest it; it continues to require feed and for its waste to be removed yet there's no money coming in to fund either the feed or waste removal since the plant to process said pig into pork chops and bacon is closed and thus the hog cannot be sold.

“It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running,” Smithfield Chief Executive Ken Sullivan said in a statement on Sunday. “These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers.”

Smithfield said it will resume operations in Sioux Falls after further direction from local, state and federal officials. The company will pay employees for the next two weeks, according to the statement.

They didn't choose to close down, they were told to close down.

“We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19,” he said.

Meanwhile a huge swath of Florida vegetable growers have left their produce to rot as there are no buyers; restaurants are their customers and they're closed -- they lack the packaging equipment to re-purpose to retail sale, and even if they wanted to the foreign supply chains, for as long as they last, are a few pennies cheaper.  Thus those vegetables have been left out to rot and are irrevocably gone.

We are days to weeks away from something important breaking in the supply chains and there is no way for any of us, myself included, to know in advance which will be the critical piece in a supply chain that breaks and causes non-availability of life-critical items -- and that supply chain will not be able to be restarted for weeks if not months.

Just for example: It takes about 48 days to grow a broiler (chicken) and close to six months for a hog.  Once the supply chain for either gets hosed that's the minimum time for it to start to refill.  Oh by the way, for a cow -- it's not a few months; those take 2-3 years, depending on whether on pasture or grain-fed.  Gestation for a cow is 9 months, almost exactly as long as a human.

Then there are the rural and suburban hospitals.  They're locked down, forbidden by state E/Os from performing anything except "emergency" procedures.  Same for dentists.  In big urban centers there are Covid-19 cases, so they still have business and in a handful of big urban areas lots of it.  In suburban and rural areas this is not true; many of those hospitals do not have a single case and they have no other patients either as they're forbidden from handling anything not deemed "life critical." These practices and hospitals are within weeks if not days of financial collapse and no, "loans" will not help them, forgiven or not.  If you have a heart attack and that hospital is closed you're screwed when the closest one that is still open is 50 miles or more away.  This is not theoretical folks; I'm hearing it more and more from various contacts within the industry both on the medical and dental side and if the lockdown orders are not lifted in very short order -- essentially now -- you're going to lose these resources permanently.  The longer this goes on the more of those offices and hospitals will be shuttered and gone.

We murdered the economy for exactly zero benefit.

Folks, the madness must stop now or we're going to break critical things in this country and when we do more people are going to die, by far, than the virus could ever kill.

Never mind state funding collapses -- those are already happening and showing up in canceled road and bridge work:

The North Carolina Department of Transportation has slashed its expected construction projects from 131 down to 38 for the upcoming budget year, a $2 billion reduction.

Ohio has delayed projects until next year on interstate highways in Columbus and Cincinnati because of the expected decline in fuel tax revenue.

Faced with a budget shortfall, Missouri has postponed $46 million for 18 road and bridge projects that had been priorities for local governments. As many as 299 additional projects valued at $785 million could be at risk without federal help, McKenna said.

I don't care if you're scared of the virus.  We either kill the lockdowns right now, today, or they're going to kill us at a rate far exceeding what the virus could have ever done.

Wuhan Coronavirus Shutdowns Hitting America’s Farms