The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the world to pause. We are to stay at home, only get what we need from the stores (if it’s there), and work at home while we are also raising our children. Farmers, on the other hand, are hurting in more ways than one. In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping gallons of fresh milk into lagoons, in Idaho farmers are digging ditches to bury onions. We hurried to the store to stock up on our pantry items, farmers are being forced to dump millions of pounds of fresh food that they could no longer sell.
I have a friend that is also a dairy farmer, who shared a picture of farmers in West Tennesse having to dump their milk tanks down the drain. Not for a bacteria or other factor, but simply because the market is at a standstill. With the closing of restaurants, many farmers were left high and dry with no buyers to get their products. And even with the increase of most Americans eating every meal at home, this is not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that had been planted weeks before the pandemic hit.
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. Even with farmers donating what they can to their local food banks, which have seen some of their highest demands, this is still limited because of the amount of refrigerated space they have available.
Milk can’t be picked up for processing because they just don’t have the room to hold it. This is because what they do have isn’t leaving the plants fast enough.
In recent days, Sanderson Farms has donated some of its chicken to food banks and organizations that cook meals for emergency medical workers. But hatching hundreds of thousands of eggs for the purpose of charity is not a viable option, said Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer.
“We’re set up to sell that chicken,” Mr. Cockrell said. “That would be an expensive proposition.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html
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This is an unfortunate circumstance. Hopefully more farmers can find a way to donate more of their products to local food banks to help the community as much as possible during this crisis.
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