Dairy Farms Forced To Dump Millions Of Liters Of Milk

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boris

boris

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Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic

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.

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.

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.

And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.

The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is an especially dystopian turn of events, even by the standards of a global pandemic. It reflects the profound economic uncertainty wrought by the virus and how difficult it has been for huge sectors of the economy, like agriculture, to adjust to such a sudden change in how they must operate.


Even as Mr. Allen and other farmers have been plowing fresh vegetables into the soil, they have had to plant the same crop again, hoping the economy will have restarted by the time the next batch of vegetables is ready to harvest. But if the food service industry remains closed, then those crops, too, may have to be destroyed.


Farmers are also learning in real time about the nation’s consumption habits.

The quarantines have shown just how many more vegetables Americans eat when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they have to cook for themselves.

“People don’t make onion rings at home,” said Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho.

Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. After his largest customer — the restaurant industry — shut down in California and New York, his farm started redistributing onions from 50-pound sacks into smaller bags that could be sold in grocery stores. He also started freezing some onions, but he has limited cold-storage capacity.

With few other options, Mr. Myers has begun burying tens of thousands of pounds of onions and leaving them to decompose in trenches.

Janet Poppendieck, an expert on poverty and food assistance.

The waste has become especially severe in the dairy industry, where cows need to be milked multiple times a day, regardless of whether there are buyers.

Major consumers of dairy, like public schools and coffee shops, have all but vanished, leaving milk processing plants with fewer customers at a time of year when cows produce milk at their fastest rate. About 5 percent of the country’s milk supply is currently being dumped and that amount is expected to double if the closings are extended over the next few months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

Before the pandemic, the Dairymens processing plant in Cleveland would produce three loads of milk, or around 13,500 gallons, for Starbucks every day. Now the Starbucks order is down to one load every three days.

For a while after the pandemic took hold, the plant collected twice as much milk from farmers as it could process, keeping the excess supply in refrigerated trailers, said Brian Funk, who works for Dairymens as a liaison to farmers.


But eventually the plant ran out of storage. One night last week, Mr. Funk worked until 11 p.m., fighting back tears as he called farmers who supply the plant to explain the predicament.

“We’re not going to pick your milk up tomorrow,” he told them. “We don’t have any place to put it.”

One of the farms that got the call was the Hartschuh Dairy Farm, which has nearly 200 cows on a plot of land in northern Ohio.


A week ago, Rose Hartschuh, who runs the farm with her family, watched her father-in-law flush 31,000 pounds of milk into a lagoon. It took more than an hour for the milk to flow out of its refrigerated tank and down the drain pipe.

For years, dairy farmers have struggled with low prices and bankruptcies. “This is one more blow below the belt,” Ms. Hartschuh said.

To prevent further dumping, farming groups are trying everything to find places to send the excess milk — even lobbying pizza chains to increase the amount of cheese on every slice.

But there are logistical obstacles that prevent dairy products from being shifted neatly from food service customers to retailers.

At many dairy processors, for example, the machinery is designed to package shredded cheese in large bags for restaurants or place milk in small cartons for schools, rather than arrange the products in retail-friendly containers.

To repurpose those plants to put cheese in the 8 oz. bags that sell in grocery stores or bottle milk in gallon jugs would require millions of dollars in investment. For now, some processors have concluded that spending the money isn’t worth it.

poultry plants that were set up to distribute chicken to restaurants rather than stores. Each week, the chicken processor Sanderson Farms destroys 750,000 unhatched eggs, or 5.5 percent of its total production, sending them to a rendering plant to be turned into pet food.

Last week, the chief executive of Sanderson Farms, Joe Sanderson, told analysts that company officials had even considered euthanizing chickens to avoid selling them at unprofitable rates, though the company ultimately did not take that step.


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.”
 

mrchibbs

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Another reason to move to small-scale farming instead of relying on industrial chains.

Small-scale farmers producing for their immediate community would never throw away their food when so many are in need.
 

Gone Peating

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Another reason to move to small-scale farming instead of relying on industrial chains.

Small-scale farmers producing for their immediate community would never throw away their food when so many are in need.

It's all but impossible to be profitable at small-scale farming nowadays unfortunately, at least in the US
 

mrchibbs

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It's all but impossible to be profitable at small-scale farming nowadays unfortunately, at least in the US

I think that's a myth. (For what it's worth, and it's not worth much), but I did my master thesis in Agricultural Economics, and based on the evidence I found, both organic, and small scale farming can be very profitable, it's mostly mental barriers.
 
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I think that's a myth. (For what it's worth, and it's not worth much), but I did my master thesis in Agricultural Economics, and based on the evidence I found, both organic, and small scale farming can be very profitable, it's mostly mental barriers.
That's good to hear. People need to be aware and support local farmers as much as they can.
 

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What's Really to Blame for Rising Prices​

Editor's Note: Supply chain issues and rising prices continue to cause frustrations across the economy. But Joel has a way out of the mess... and draws an interesting parallel to our education system. It's proof we can fix things ourselves and not rely on the government. Check it out below.



Joel Salatin
Joel Salatin

I have a friend who operates a small, federally inspected slaughterhouse. Before COVID-19, he had an inspector assigned to his facility. Although it was not a comfortable relationship, it was tolerable.

If the inspector wanted something changed, she'd tell him about it and he'd get it fixed in a day. He didn't get written up. The infraction could be corrected efficiently and simply. Most issues were addressed in-house and fixed the same way. It was like an ongoing conversation.

But since COVID-19, all that has changed... showing yet again who is really to blame for our economy's problems.

Who's to Blame?​

Now the inspectors for these small plants are working from home in their pajamas. The people dispatched to the plant are not inspectors but young surrogates (usually college students) who use their smartphones to take pictures all day.

Those pictures are uploaded to the inspectors, and the inspectors may comment on them as they wish. The result is a tsunami of emails, clarifications, accusations and texts flooding into the business.

A process that was once handled in-house and face-to-face has been replaced with buckets of bureaucratic questions, requests and threats.

All these inspectors weigh in on the pictures because they want to justify their job. So instead of having just one person provide oversight, the business has up to a dozen people - not on-site - commenting on what they think they might be seeing in pictures.

These small businesses are being buried in an avalanche of emails. They have to explain complicated procedures that have been approved for years to a newly unleashed group of threatening, tyrannical bureaucrats, who lack context and work in their pajamas.

While the media and government officials lament rising meat prices and supply chain issues, I can assure you that farmers have plenty of cows and chickens.

The shortages and escalating prices are not about production. Instead, they reflect these kinds of monkey wrenches thrown into the processing system.

Fighting for Freedom​

As this regulatory noose continues to tighten, farms like ours seek alternatives.

It's similar to the home school and charter school response to school lockdowns. In Virginia, home schooling is up by 40% since the COVID-19 lockdowns.

The difference between education and meat processing is that the home-schoolers won freedom for themselves about three decades ago through state legislation. The Home School Legal Defense Association provided critical counsel and legislative impetus to push these freedoms through.

In the meat sector, we don't yet have a broad coalition of people ready to take on the government-sanctioned processing institutions. Most folks are still under the delusion that government inspectors are necessary to ensure food safety.

It's the same thinking as in the 1970s, when the mindset was that the government was necessary to educate your child. Anything else risked your child's future.

Gradually, people began to realize that this was not the only way. Indeed, parents began realizing that with some savvy and good materials, they could teach their children quite well, or find a tutor or develop other alternatives.

The private education revival our country has witnessed in the last half-century is remarkable.

The notion that the only safe hamburger comes from a room licensed by a government agent is as preposterous as the notion that the only viable education comes administered by the government.

Food is the new school. Where education was 50 years ago, food is today. If escalating food prices and supply chain issues in this Neanderthal system fuel the passion for change of liberty-loving freedom fighters, it could bring about a great shift from our current dysfunctional state.

Pay Attention​

Anyone who places our current food debacles on the backs of farmers isn't paying attention. To be sure, farm production protocols vary greatly. The best farmers have extremely low dependency on petroleum (in the form of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) and few health issues. Smaller farms that rely on compost and nature are less subject to the outside forces that currently gum up the production works.

But because we marginalize farmers, people generally direct their food anger at them. I wish I could wave a magic wand and divert that frustration to where it belongs.

I have no clue what it will take to make the average person aware that their food problems stem not from farmers but from unelected bureaucrats and the enabling politicians who have put them there to stamp "Government Approved" on every morsel of food.

Just like early in the home-schooling movement, when advocates began labeling public schools "government schools" to bolster their point, I think we need to start calling supermarket food "government food" in order to create a new awareness around this issue.

Only when a broad coalition of citizens demands something other than "government food" will these arbitrary and capricious price and supply issues be solved.

They will never be solved from the top down.

Sincerely,

Joel

Joel Salatin | Contributor​

Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don't like him call him a bioterrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan and a starvation advocate. He draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world.​
 

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