Food Crisis 2019: An Outbreak Of African Swine Fever Is Devastating Global Pig Population

TMIN The Most Important News ^ | April 3, 2019 | Michael T. Snyder

[JAKraig]

A friend of mine once left a comfy bank job to be a part owner and manager of a pig farm. This was a very large operation. they had several buildings separated by hundreds of yards where the pigs lived.

Great care was taken daily to clean and disinfect the buildings. His taking me on a tour was special, he said they don’t usually allow anyone near the pigs, it is too dangerous to the pigs since pigs can catch human diseases. Several hundred pigs live in each building, if one gets sick they all get sick. At least the way they do it they only lose one building if they are careful. The workers disinfect themselves often, take mandatory vaccinations and seldom are in contact with the pigs. The pigs can pretty much be managed remotely. The thing that I noticed is how serious they are about protecting the pigs from disease. You cough, you leave, not just the building, the farm.

The states of Iowa, Nebraska, parts of the states that border them have been devastated by late snow and rain. They are suffering many billions of dollar losses. Hundreds of thousands of head of cattle have been lost, perhaps in the millions.

Cattle are fed by the farmers that raise them by planting their own crops. They won’t be planting their grain crops this year or if then do they will be lucky to have a harvest before freezing weather. We have only just begun to see the effects of this devastation. There are farmers that didn’t lose their herds who won’t be able to feed them this year. They not only lost the ground that produces the crops but many of them lost their silos that that hold the produce from the previous harvest. Grain prices will skyrocket. There will be increasingly stiff competition for the grains that feed cattle and feed our cars.

If you don’t have a freezer full of beef I recommend you fill it NOW. In the short term many farmers will have to sell their herd remnants because they won’t be able to feed them so prices will remain low for a while but then it will go through the roof. If you fill your freezer make sure you have a generator and at least several days of fuel on hand to keep it running a couple hours twice a day to keep it cold.

It could easily be a couple of years before beef prices start coming down again, that is only if the global cooling that is causing all this rain subsides for a while.

Pray for global warming.