Covid 19 has brought stress in all of our lives and one of those stresses have been purchasing healthy foods for our families as the shelves continue to be scarcely supplied in most supermarkets and retail locations. As with many things we have learned in the epidemic, our food supply has inherent problems given by current regulations and structures enforced by our government. These regulations and laws are outdated and simply harmful to the existence of both the farmers and to the families in the USA.
Lets take a look at our current food delivery model. First, farmers somewhere in the USA invest their hard-earned money in to producing foods for the good folks who live here in the United States of America. The farmer not just invests their money but also invests their family’s’ time in working sun up to sun down to produce the best possible foods for our families. Then if things go well, there comes a time when the farmer can sell their produce or livestock and this is typically done at auctions and larger coagulators gather large herds of various animals and move them to feedlots where they are finished and prepared for sale to packing plants. Then the packing plants get the livestock and begins the butchering process. Then once butchered, the packed meats are off to the distribution companies that distribute them to supermarkets, restaurants and other markets. The sad part of this whole process is the Farmers that invested their money and family’s time, make the least per pound out of all of the other corporations that make loads off the backs of our farmers. There are just so many USA regulations that force this antiquated chain of profiteers to continue this model and worse of all the laws and regulations are built to ensure that the families that run these profitable corporations will not be cut out of the process.
What happens when this antiquated food chain hits a problem? Well, lets take a look at the Covid 19 epidemic for example to point out why this system has some serious issues in its current structure. There could be a million reasons why these corporations cannot meet the food needs of our USA families. Things like strikes by unions, natural disasters like hurricanes, price manipulations and most currently, Covid 19. What happens to our food chain when these things happen to the big corporations? It’s happening now…. The auction houses stop, the feed lots are filled to capacity and animals are kept in lots that were to be very temporary and now knee deep in manure and an unhealthy environment, the super market shelves begin to show signs of scarcity and worse of all there are huge hurds of livestock waiting to make it to our needing familes. The farmer has nowhere to take their livestock and their investments are now worthless and without the sale of these valuable animals at wholesale prices, the farmer has no money to continue his operations which includes buying huge feed and other necessities to keep these animals. Instead of watching the livestock starve to death, they are forced to euthanize them evn though there are families that desperately need food for their families. This problem is not unique and happens in just about every food channel in the USA (Beef, Chicken, Turkey, Pork, Produce, Milk and on and on….). This doesn’t really hurt the corporations as the prices of these items simply go up and passed on to the USA families and hence keeping the corporations profits very healthy but the farmers are being hurt badly. This is simply because the farmer cannot sell directly to the public due to the current laws and regulations in place. What if farmers could sell directly to the waiting hands of the a needing public and not be forced to sell their products at near non-profitable levels to the corporate chain that awaits?
You can help, ask your local congressman, senator and regulators to stop this antiquated process. Thus allowing a true free-market where people have choice in what they buy and how much they pay. And best yet, all families can enjoy an abundance even in trying times like now. While we wait for the government to reduce or eliminate these unfair and monopolistic chains, we can all find a farmer that wants and needs to sell their quality products and buy directly though them which supports a stable food chain.
In the meantime, we will watch farmers euthanize their livestock, dump their milk, compost their produce and bury their eggs.
Here are just a few of these tragic stories:
The Hoehn family has run a hog-farm for 6 generations. They can feed and care for about 20,000 hogs at a time, but with no cash coming in from the sale of their hogs, and other pigs continuing to have new litters, the Hoehns began to run out of room to house their hogs and food to feed them. Soon they were forced to euthanize thousands of their hogs. “We did it ourselves,” she explains. Friends and neighbors helped, to share the burden, and their sadness.
Poultry farmers in Delaware and Maryland say they are being forced to destroy 2 million chickens because there aren’t enough working packing plants to process this food for the public. This follows a warning by the head of Tyson Foods, who said the nation’s food supply chain is breaking down as the coronavirus sweeps through meat packing plants.
Dairy farmers are forced to dumping out as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk every day, according to estimates from Dairy Farmers of America, the country’s largest dairy cooperative.
Farmers in Washington State are watching one billion pounds of potatoes rot due to restaurant closures, school closures and disrupted distributions channels according to the Washington Potato Commission.
Fresh produce is going to waste during the virus outbreak as supply chains crumble and farmers have trouble selling food. At least $5 billion of fresh fruits and vegetables have already been wasted, according to estimates from the Produce Marketing Association, as many farmers plow ripe crops back into the soil and losing their complete investment.
A pile of zucchini and squash simply rot in the fields as the farmer sadly looks on to his hard work on April 1, 2020 in Florida City, Florida.
Virus outbreaks in pork-processing plants have caused several plants to shut down, leading to overcrowding of pigs in barns and discussions over euthanizing thousands of hogs in order to deal with the lack capacity in Smithville, Ohio. John Tyson, chairman of Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, has warned that plant closures due to the pandemic will result in the loss of millions of animals like chickens, pigs and cattle.
In Albany, Minnesota, Kerry and Barb Mergen stand outside their now-empty chicken house after a crew that came in just before Easter to euthanize 61,000 laying hens in their flock. The Mergens were contract chicken farmers and the owner of their chickens, Daybreak Foods, decided to cut their losses and euthanize the flock.
A MUST WATCH YouTube video created by “Our Wyoming Life” which does an amazing job at uncovering this huge regulatory problem in the USA which benefits some. WOW!!!
You can VOTE with your dollars by finding farmers able and willing to sell you quality food direct to your table. We here at www.TheOrganicFarmMarket.com are doing all we can to make this happen.
Help by calling your local ELECTED politicians and demanding food chain reform NOW and by ordering your food directly from our nations precious assets called “Farmers”.