Posted on 04/22/2020 10:56:32 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Kerry Mergen, a contract egg farmer near Albany, Minn., got word on a Wednesday the chickens in his barn would be euthanized. A crew showed up the next morning and started gassing the birds with carbon dioxide.
The sudden drop in demand for food at restaurants, school cafeterias and caterers shut down by the pandemic has ripped through farming. Milk has been dumped, eggs smashed and ripe lettuce plowed under. Now, farms are killing animals sooner than planned.
Mergen said he initially couldn’t believe it when a field manager from Daybreak Foods, the Lake Mills, Wis.-based firm that owned and paid to feed the flock of 61,000 birds, said they might be killed early. His contract called for the flock to produce eggs until fall. “I was wrong and the company decided to do it anyway,” Mergen said.
A primary destination for eggs from the flock — a Cargill Inc. fluid egg plant in Big Lake, Minn. — temporarily shut down last week and laid off 300 employees there. The company cited declining demand for the decision to idle the facility, which handles 800 million eggs a year and sends containers of fluid egg to food-service companies across North America.
Demand for eggs in grocery stores is high and the price of a dozen eggs has risen. But much of the egg-production system is built to provide fluid eggs to food service companies and changing farms to provide eggs for retail is neither simple nor quick.
Mergen said his was one of five egg farms where chickens were euthanized in Minnesota in recent weeks, and that the other four were larger than his farm.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Or maybe sell ungraded eggs for a while? Just get the regs temporarily revoked. If that happened, there would be lots of truckers hauling those 5,000 eggs each day to supermarkets all over the midwest.
Golden Comets are nice birds. did you lose any?
Dimocrat states just love to kill things. Chickens, unborn babies . . .
I’m guessing tenant farmers on farms owned by big Communist Chinese companies. They already bought out a lot of our food production capabilities.
“Is it so hard to do?”
You and a strange number of other FReepers think Trump can undo all cr@p anyone in government has ever done, and should have done so a while ago.
Stop with the attitude! Simply say something can be encouraged rather than say you are p!$$=d he hasn’t done it.
Isn’t that special. Farmers destroy food as people need food. I suspect this is about government and regulations.
Advertising is going to do anything for them. They don’t have the cartons, the distribution network or any of that. Nearly 60% of the food we make in this country goes to restaurants. Even with home demand up it didn’t double. And there’s all those midsteps.
“Commercial egg producers cull layers (called battery hens) when they’re one to three years old. Meat birds are slaughtered at six to eight weeks. “
https://animals.mom.me/life-expectancy-laying-hen-1727.html
But they are not in grocery stores... why didn’t the stock shift to grocery stores?
I can’t find them in Costco, Walmart, King Soopers.
If people aren’t buying them in restaurants, it doesn’t mean that they stopped eating eggs, they are eating them at home.
Give them to homeless shelters.
If the flipping government is going to hand out printed money, pay chicken farmers to donate their eggs to food banks, homeless shelters, hospitals.
For goodness sake, this is a ridiculous response.
“shocked to hear of the Smithfield ownership”
Me too. That was very shocking, indeed.
It’s not about smarts. It’s about infrastructure. Packaging, shipping, distribution. There’s a whole lot that goes into getting food from farm to table. You can’t just declare “all this stuff that can’t go to restaurants now goes somewhere else”. You need to put the stuff in place to make that move. And that’s month in the process to get all the things made and channels mapped out. That’s really something somebody at the fed level should have started contemplating the minute anybody started talking about shutting down anything. Diverting supply chain is a massive national undertaking.
In his daily briefings, he covers an amazing amount of territory, far-ranging in its scope. I don’t know that he’s addressed food security and deregulation needed to assure a steady and reliable supply.
He’s a very smart businessman and he’s the one who has constantly bragged about all the deregulation his administration has done. Food supply chain deregulation should be on his list.
Yes, this needs to happen now. There is no reason we are throwing away food/destroying sources of food production when there are people lined up outside of food banks desperate for food.
Didn’t we just read that there a Co2 Shortage affecting Beer and Soda Producers? Now we know why...
Our Safeway sells excellent soup under its “Signature” brand in plastic one-pound tubs. The cooler now has three-pound pouches with a generic text-only label on it. The one-pound soup in the plastic tub sells for $4. The same soup in the plastic pouch sells 3 pounds for $5!
I’m just guessing here, but it appears that this is a wholesale package that was somehow able to find its way to the same refrigerator in the grocery store for retail sale.
This should be done a lot more frequently.
Absolutely agree with you that you cannot change the supply chain infrastructure on a dime and with your comment “That’s really something somebody at the fed level should have started contemplating the minute anybody started talking about shutting down anything.” — AMEN to that.
Hence my argument about getting the FDA regulations out of the way that prevent wholesale packages from going to the retail supply chain. It would be a start.
Too many Jim Gaffigans on this post... You can’t pull things out of your a$$ just because you want them. There are a lot of logistics BESIDES government regulation that force farmers to dump products. First of all, cows make milk and chickens make eggs whether you need them or not, and they are very perishable. Second of all, a factory can’t be retooled to produce different packaging and sorting overnight. This takes weeks in the best of times, and probably longer when people have to maintain distancing. And lastly, there is no point in being in business to lose money. It hurts our nature to see livestock killed, but it is no different than oil or semiconductors slowing production in economic terms.
Of course those packages were already going to the grocery stores. All they done is start selling them direct. It’s very different for eggs. Restaurants get eggs in cases, a dozen trays of 3 dozen eggs each. How do you sell those in grocery stores? Especially in this time frame when we want as few hands as possible touching products. Not to mention that the wholesaler and shipping channels used to get eggs to restaurants are completely different than the ones to grocery stores. Heck usually it’s even different farms. So the guys making eggs for restaurants have literally 0 of the necessary contacts to get them somewhere else. This is where the fed should have been thinking and planning. At the very least figure out a way to buy these eggs from the farms and divert them to food banks and other charities. There’s no shake and bake solution. Somebody needed to sit down and understand the logistics on an industry by industry basis (shipping lettuce is different than shipping eggs), then figure out how to redirect them.
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