This is a conundrum. See if you can make sense of it.
According to the New York Times, farmers are destroying the food they produce because demand has fallen due to restaurants closing in response to the pandemic.
The New York Times reports:
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.
After weeks of concern about 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.
The 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.
In Delaware and Maryland, two million chickens will be “depopulated,” killed by agribusiness, because many processing plants are closed due to the virus. The chickens will be killed and disposed of, never reaching the hungry. If you have ever been to Delmarva, the small area where Delaware, Maryland and Virginia converge, you have seen the units where the chickens are hatched and confined until they are slaughtered. The chickens’ feet never touch the ground. The lights in these units are on 24/7 to speed their growth. This is agribusiness at its worst. Once you have seen these places, you will avoid buying chicken produced under these in humans conditions, like a crop.
But at the same time, people in impoverished nations are approaching starvation due to the absence of food supplies. This was also reported in the New York Times a few days after the story about farmers destroying their products:
The head of the U.N. food agency warned Tuesday that, as the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, it is also “on the brink of a hunger pandemic” that could lead to “multiple famines of biblical proportions” within a few months if immediate action isn’t taken.
World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley told the U.N. Security Council that even before COVID-19 became an issue, he was telling world leaders that “2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.” That’s because of wars in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, locust swarms in Africa, frequent natural disasters and economic crises including in Lebanon, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, he said.
Beasley said today 821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, a further 135 million people are facing “crisis levels of hunger or worse,” and a new World Food Program analysis shows that as a result of COVID-19 an additional 130 million people “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.”
He said in the video briefing that WFP is providing food to nearly 100 million people on any given day, including “about 30 million people who literally depend on us to stay alive.”
Beasley, who is recovering from COVID-19, said if those 30 million people can’t be reached, “our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period” — and that doesn’t include increased starvation due to the coronavirus.
“In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries, and in fact, in 10 of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation,” he said.
According to WFP, the 10 countries with the worst food crises in 2019 were Yemen, Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti.
In our own country, millions of people are going hungry and get their food from free food banks.
The Washington Post reported a few days ago on this paradox of farmers killing their crops while people go hungry:
Farmers in the upper Midwest euthanize their baby pigs because the slaughterhouses are backing up or closing, while dairy owners in the region dump thousands of gallons of milk a day. In Salinas, Calif., rows of ripe iceberg, romaine and red-leaf lettuce shrivel in the spring sun, waiting to be plowed back into the earth.
Drone footage shows a 1.5-mile-long line of cars waiting their turn at a drive-through food bank in Miami. In Dallas, schools serve well north of 500,000 meals on each service day, cars rolling slowly past stations of ice chests and insulated bags as food service employees, volunteers and substitute teachers hand milk and meal packets through the windows.
Surely some brilliant person or agency could figure out how to get our excess crops and produce to hungry Americans and to people in nations that are facing mass starvation.
Can’t the government give farmers some money and help get these products to food banks or grocery stores. I do worry about a severe food shortage. Why would farmers grow crops if they have to turn around and destroy them?
Yes, or how about if the tech billionaires fund food distribution instead of ultra-surveillance state, data mongering contact tracing (which is what they use on suspected terrorists).
Crops were planted before the pandemic occurred, before they realized that there would be no market for their crops. Milk cows have to be milked everyday. Herds were well established before the pandemic and the closing of plants.
Money made from the sale of their produce/crops provide money to reinvest in planting new crops- labor, seeds, irrigation, maintaining equipment, fuel, harvesting, storage… the hidden costs of farming are endless. The work is hard enough but then add no recompense for their labor? No resources to continue farming?
Farmers are out in the hot sun day after day doing work most of us would not do. Or in the cold barns feeding their livestock and hogs.
Then to hope and pray that the weather won’t destroy them but the plug on. There is no end to the work of a farmer. The up side: it is a constant reminder that there is a God – working so closely with His creation.
Mary,
I agree about individual farmers, but the giant agribusiness corporate leaders don’t plant crops or milk cows.
If there is a god, he has an interesting sense of morality. He sends a pandemic that kills by the thousands the very people his son told us we are supposed to take care of – the poor, the hungry, the aged, etc., yet it’s sparing (even further enriching) those whom his son said would have a harder time getting into heaven than the camel would have of getting through the eye of the needle; the very people he threw out of the temple for making it a “den of thieves”.
God works in mysterious ways indeed, if by “mysterious” you mean hypocritical and really pretty sick.
I still don’t believe that schools are using less food. Most schools that I’m aware of are continuing to provide daily grab-n-go lunches and breakfasts. If anything, they may need more food, as most are now serving private and home-schooled kids whom they weren’t previously serving, and many are even serving the adults of the community.
In NYC, the schools are providing food to anyone who needs it.
Ddienne 77, You said, “If there is a god…” Ask the astronauts
who have had the opportunity to see planet Earth from an different perspective.
God has given us a free will; He won’t interfere with that.
All the problems today date back to bad choices. Since we are hammering the farmer, look who put Round Up on the market? It causes cancer. Who put DDT on the market?
It too causes cancer. Both were sold to the farmers under the guise that they were good. Did God create those chemicals?
Look who is taking away all the rich fertile soil for housing developments. Precious, rich land has been squandered on sprawling mansions. Look at our water supply. Who is contaminating it and who is squandering it on luxurious baths. And the litany goes on.
Today my son in, referencing W.V. Quine, as he wrote to extend empathy to a relative:
“I always tell my kids time is an illusion. The clock measures minutes, but we live in moments. Moments are like baseball — they define their own duration.
I also tell them about perception, using the example of the optical illusion which shows either two faces or a birdbath.
I explain to them it is neither one nor the other — it is both, and the challenge for them is to realize that while it is both, they can choose which aspect they want to focus on. I tell them to practice focusing on the faces.
When we find ourselves at our darkest, it’s only because we have been fortunate enough to have lives that matter, with people of consequence. The sadness we feel hurts, but it is just a sign of how lucky we are to be surrounded by such good people.
What I learned in Sierra Leone is most people have miserable lives surrounded by wretchedness. I never realized how good I had it until I realized all I took for granted about the people I was surrounded by.
More than running water and electricity, the resource which I realized I was spoiled by, was kindness and decency. I was surrounded by it and didn’t realize how scarce it really is.
Your sadness is real — but only because you have had such good fortune with …… It is an awful place to agonize over those we love — especially somebody as rock solid as ….., the paragon of a good man — something we are in short supply of.
This disease is a total nightmare, and ….. does not deserve what is happening to him.
The ball is in the air. You have to wait in agony to see where it lands. Try to focus not on the pain, but the joy that brings the pain. Try to appreciate how fortunate you are.
Try to tune out the birdbath.
Try to focus on the faces”
Like my son said, focus on the joy. This pandemic is bringing goodness, kindness, generosity out of the wood work- such heroic
people we have never seen the likes of. Many are our neighbors.
Very sad, infuriating with so many hungry kids in society. Destroying harvests has long been a feature of the American market system. Dept of Ag routinely issues marketing orders authorizing massive destruction of crops to prevent a surplus. Most notorious was “the orange mountain” in 80s when bumper citrus crops threatened to collapse price of oranges and put cheap citrus on all family tables. A mountain of rotting oranges was result. EU is famous for producing “the butter mountain” to prevent surplus dairy collapsing price at food stores. This is one irrational outcome of capitalism whose marketing creates artificial shortages to arbitrarily and unnecessarily elevate prices. Failure to build affordable housing is similar–enough land , labor, and resources exist to do so and house all families in decent homes but the private market system profits from creating shortage in affordable housing.
The privatizers are always saying, “Let the market decide.” When there is a surplus, capitalists manipulate the market to keep prices up. When there is a crisis like the one we are facing, they turn into socialists expecting the government to bail them out. On the way up, they are capitalists. On the way down, they become socialists screaming, “Where’s my bailout?” Many corporations need a bailout because they used their profit to buy back their stock to pump up its value, and they handed executives huge compensation packages.
It’s all a game of charades and we the public lose every time.
So why do we keep playing?
“Tides”
A rising tide lifts boats
And falling tide remands
The rich man always floats
And poor man always strands
For a long, long time now, in the U.S., big consulting firms have worked to create “efficiencies” in U.S. industries by promoting Lean JIT (just in time) delivery–of raw materials for production, of products to market. And so we don’t have the stockpiles that we had in the past–of food, of PPE, of anything. But such systems are fragile, as we are seeing. And our Libertarian-ideology Repugnican and DINOcrat leaders aren’t willing to step in and buy up those 25 lb cans of green beans, those 80 lb bags of flour or shredded cheese, for distribution not to restaurants but to the poor. And they aren’t willing to commandeer existing storage and transportation businesses–the ones who serve restaurants and hotel kitchens and the like. The Trumpsters don’t give a hair on a rat’s tushy if poor people are hungry, even though a lot of them are poor whites who go to Trump rallies. They figure that these people are too stupid to know why they are hungry, and they’re right about that.
Bob Also, what scares me every day when I get up is that, today, there is someone in the world like Stephen Miller. CBK
Agreed. He’s a psychopath.
exactly
I read this at the same time that I read about lines of people waiting for help from food banks. Billionaires could be helpful to pay to transport the crops and surplus milk to food banks. It would be a genuine act of charity instead of providing seed money for a venture that will make them even richer.
I go to a supermarket right down the road, and there are no eggs. Meanwhile, there is an egg farm 20 miles the other direction with too many eggs. Fact, seen with my own eyes.
The dysfunction is mind-boggling. But, you know, we’ve been seeing this sort of thing for years and years in schools. Small, local schools disparaged. Meanwhile, huge, national, corporate schemes promoted.
To wit: kids who want to learn but what we’ve been forced to serve them up is boring test prep. POVERTY (a bland, cardboard, corporate controlled curriculum) amidst PLENTY (children who by the nature hunger to learn, who are wonderfully curious.)
But here’s this thing, as an article in The New Yorker pointed out recently, some people are making money off this dysfunction, obscene piles of money.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/the-price-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic “The Price of a Pandemic” by Nick Paumgarten.
Killer line at the end of article: “The only thing we can say with certainty is that the pain will be unfairly distributed. People are betting on it.”
It is a disgrace.
Our military can figure out how to ship our tanks, planes, weapons, food, equipment, etc all around the world with no problem. Why don’t we ask them?
Because we have no national leadership
Of course, there are many issues to be resolved. Transportation, refrigeration and storage. All this requires not only getting the military involved but also commandeering some industrial operations. Trump and the Repugnicans won’t do that. Against their ideology. Better to let people starve.
. . . more to the point, why fund blue states. CBK
I’ll oversimplify the situation here. There are multiple branches of the food supply chain, a system that is far more complex and specialized than most people realize. From a pure logistics, processing and manufacturing standpoint, there’s no fast or easy way to rearrange all that, to transfer capacity around to where it’s needed and useful. This is not to say that better, more visionary leadership at the federal level could not abate this to some degree and get at least some of our Ag output into people’s hands, but we’re dealing with the abject stupidity of a fart breathing idiot who thinks that injecting disinfectant might be a solution to the pandemic. There is no “big picture” managerial skill or experience in the executive branch, just looters and sycophants.
I meant to write “some of our Ag output that’s going to
waste”. Sorry
Jon,
You are right. Here is a story that NPR’s show The Indicator did about potatoes: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/843437140
That’s a beautiful, inspiring story, TE. Thanks for sharing it. This potato farmer is smart. He did a lot of good, and he will be able to claim his donations on his taxes. So, some small financial benefit from his good work, as well, in addition to the benefit of knowing that he did the right thing for his countrymen and women.
Our totally incompetent ignoramus of a president continues to only think about how this is affecting HIM. Why doesn’t he care about the crops that are being destroyed when people are hungry? Why doesn’t he care about 1/3 of the population that hasn’t paid their rent for April? Why doesn’t he care about the lack of PPE for medical workers and ventilators for the sick? Why doesn’t he REALLY care about small businesses instead of wanting corporations who have mismanaged their funds to receive more taxpayer money? Why doesn’t he care about how many are dying due to lack of decent testing ability?
He has no compassion and cares only about getting the media to congratulate him on a ‘job well done’.
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The Hill:
President Trump on Monday ripped the media’s coverage of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, returning to a familiar theme as the White House canceled its coronavirus briefing — another signal is it changing its strategy on messaging.
“There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy!” Trump tweeted Monday morning
Shame on us for expecting Trump to care about anyone other than himself.
Omg! You are so blind, stick your stupid head back in the sand!
David Baker: You are outnumbered on this blog. Please find another place to write your nonsense.
Shame on us for expecting Trump to care about anyone other than himself.
I do not understand why farmers are destroying food other than their markets have dried up. There are disposing of products that have a time-sensitive span for consumption by animals and humans. Trump’s trade policies and tariffs have not been kind to all farmers, especially those who raise grains, soy beans and the like for export.
I am no expert. I do remember a childhood during WWII that included tending to food crops in our “victory garden.” My grandparents also had a truck farm and in-home methods of saving or preserving and “canning” food for future use.
Apparently our large-scale food suppliers today have very different system for delivering food to retailers versus wholesalers.
Wholesale suppliers have large storage facilities and farmers or intermediaries package large batches of food for distribution to chains of restaurants and bulk users like schools. But “school food” is also (and famously) intended to meet federal guidelines for nutritional value. Ask Michelle Obama who tried to change those guidelines and ran up against the federal schemes fo distributing “surplus food” to schools.
If you go to a retail grocery store, you have goods that are packaged and sold to individual customers. The back of the store may have bins of food from wholesalers. Chains of grocers, like Kroger, operate at the wholesale and retail levels. So do outlets such as Costco and Sam’s where individuals and small businesses can buy supplies by the case-full.
Farmers depend on income from wholesale distributions. Farmers cannot live on seasonal sales at mom and pop roadside shops and urban parking-lot markets.
Some farmers and high-end restaurants are trying to survive by moving to on-line sales. Clearly “just-in-time” delivery and proper packaging are major problems.
Some edible crops that are plowed under can also make farmland more fertile.
We also need to recognize that a lot of farming now is industrialized, no longer a mom and pop and family operation. For industrial stength farming, you can be sure that CEOs, managers, and investors care more about profits and risk managment than figuring out good uses for surplus goods.
Killing livestock is a different matter altogether, especially with industrialized feed lots.
Where are all of the social entrepeneurs who are supposed to offer up brilliant solutions to problems like this? Where are the billionaires?
Amazon
Amazon for produce
Amazon for beef
Amazon is NO use
For suffering relief
Make that “Hamizon” — Amazon that delivers pork
That would be Hamazon (TM)
Hamazon
Amazon for produce
Amazon for pork
Amazon is NO use
Bezos is a dork
I have seldom seen anything as disheartening as the chicken coops on Delmarva, tall cages where thousands of chickens are “raised” without their feet ever touching the ground, lights on 24/7 to make them grow faster. These too are living creatures, yet they are treated like soy beans. Their “living” conditions are squalid; their feces fall on all the chickens on lower levels of the coop. They are born for slaughter. Now they are being “depopulated” en masse without even feeding anyone. Enough to make you a vegetarian or to never buy Tyson or any other mass-produced chicken products.
Factory farming is a dirty little secret in our country. The grotesque treatment of animals is shameful.
A few times, when this subject has come up, I have been tempted to post info about how these places operate, but I’ve held back because the details are truly horrific and disgusting. And almost all meat produced, now, comes from them. The last time this subject came up, someone posted that things would be fine if people just ate locally produced meat. Well, we could, fact, do that. If we got rid of factory farms and did that, then steak would cost $200 a pound because everyone would be clamoring for the reduced supply. These industrial means are very productive, but they are incredibly cruel, and they are very, very dangerous. Factory farms are relatively recent inventions, and they are breeding grounds for the next viral or bacterial pandemic. They also build antibiotic resistance, so that now, as a result of them, we have bacterial pathogens that are not treatable with our antibiotic of last resort. It is only a matter of time until these farms give us a pandemic that makes this one look like a picnic on the lawn. Here’s the truth people don’t want to hear: We can eat far, far, far less meat, or we can have whatever the survivors might decide to call a superpandemic. There isn’t a third alternative. Some things are entirely predictable, but people don’t want to hear the prediction.
Bob,
Many years ago, my family was vacationing in Colorado and we picked up a young woman who was hitchhiking. She told us she worked in a meat processing plant. She said the cattle were pumped up with antibiotics to fatten them faster. She said if we ever saw how the animals and the meat were treated, we would be vegetarians.
People don’t want to know of this stuff. According to the FDA, “Approximately 70% of all medically important antibiotics in the United States are sold for use in animals.” There are several really significant consequences of this:
The antibiotics get into the meat, and people consume them in low quantities, which creates antibiotic resistance in people.
Viruses and bacteria are continually mutating. In the presence of these antibiotics, the bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics are the ones that survive. So, the farms are Petri dishes for breeding, rapidly, these resistant bacteria. We are already seeing the emergence of pathogens not treatable by any known antibiotics.
In the wild, it is to the advantage of a virus or bacterium not to be TOO PATHOGENIC. They need time to replicate and to pass to a new host. The ones that are too pathogenic kill their host, and that’s the end of them. But in the crowded conditions of these farms, extremely pathogenic viruses and bacteria have huge populations that they can burn through, so the farms encourage extreme pathogenicity in both.
The antibiotics aren’t about fattening them faster, except to the extent that sick animals are runty. The antibiotics are necessary because whenever creatures are in such crowded conditions, they give one another diseases. The fattening is done with additives like various growth hormones, which is one reason why we have so many obese and diabetic kids now. They’re getting those hormones in the meat they eat. Some poultry are so big that they lose the ability to support their own weight.
They cut lesions and other undesirable bits off the meat in the line, and these go into buckets for processing into pet food and hamburger. I have a friend who is a neurologist. She won’t let her family eat ground meat.
Over several Republican maladministrations, we’ve vastly sped up processing in the slaughterhouses and reduced inspection or moved it to the end of the processing line. And so we get these massive outbreaks of e coli infection, salmonella, lysteriosis, etc.
There are seven billion of us now. And 70 billion farmed animals, all consuming food resources (crops), 90 percent of which are lost because they went into the animals’ life processes. Biology students will know that at every level in the tropic chain, this happens. If we ate, directly, the crops we feed to animals (the corn, soybeans, etc), we could return vast amounts of agricultural land to wild habitat, creating sinks for viral pathogens, slowing their mutation and burn rate through populations, and reversing the Sixth Great Extinction that the Earth is now experiencing.
As the great Oren Lyons has put it, “We’ve forgotten the rules for living on Earth. And there will be hell to pay. If you don’t understand that now, you will.”
“Understanding what a system is, and is not is central to improving…”
C-19 has hurt our eyes wide open. A MYTH-BUSTER to the Nth degree.
If only the damn (fill-in) would do their job…
Here’s some more “know-that” about trump…
The “It’s not us”, trap of false certitude, doesn’t change a thing.
Calling out the so-called “experts”, for their expertise in violation of common sense,
doesn’t give us the “know-how”.
Understand what improves, and what doesn’t improve, IS central to improving.
This is a replay of the Great Depression, the very same thing happened then. Will we at some point be fighting over a loaf of bread?
Putin paid good money and expended enormous resources of personnel to get his Agent Orange elected President of the United States. So, he had every right to expect that said Orange would place atop various government departments and agencies people dedicated either to use them to sow disruption or to render them inoperable. And, of course, if you want to render a department inoperable, actually knowing nothing about how the thing is supposed to operate and what it is supposed to do can be an asset.
I would say that Vlad has gotten a pretty substantial return on his investment.
Back in February, I was talking with a friend of mine in marketing and advertising about the coming pandemic. The first thing she said to me was, “This is going to really ****** up supply chains. We need to fix this now, or people are going to go hungry.” Now, I would like to add that this friend does not work in a food-related area. She doesn’t have some particular expertise there. She’s just sane and understands how the world works and is able to think rationally about cause and effect.
This is yet another front where the IQ45 maladministration has utterly failed the nation. The problem required (past tense) a coordinated national response. To sane people, it was entirely predictable, as was the fact that we were going to have a pandemic, as is the fact that we will have others that are worse than this one.
We were discussing the Great Depression in an economics class (back in the day) and the question came up: How did farmers have an overload of food (and subsequent waste) while, at the same time, people in the same country were starving?
His brief answer: It’s not the need or the food that go missing.
Rather, the complex systems that existed before are now “OUT OF ORDER.” The flow and its order are hidden from the view of those of us who have lived a whole life taking that order for granted and who have no interest in understanding it–or as someone above said, we have become “dysfunctional” on a massive scale. On a smaller scale, think of the order of a car–and then a tire blows, or you drive it without water in the engine for awhile, and the whole thing comes to a halt.
At least the farmers are putting the nutrients back into the soil. And the chickens’ plight makes me want to cry. . . .) . . .but we’ve been letting a skid-row bum of a person fly our 747 jet of a country for way too long, and now its “paying off” in kind. His problem? . . . He’s also on board.
And Congress is merely following the parade horses down the street with their brooms, shoulder bags, and clothespins. Though there is hope, from what I can see so far, they (and Wall Street/oligarchs) are merely applying small bandages to very large wounds, and only delaying the inevitable, as long as the pilot is in his hot-seat and the systemic/dynamic order gets further and further out of whack.
Time is relentless, however. At this point, as I see it, it’s become a nosedive that we’ll have to pull out of. Regardless of what happens in November, recovering the pieces and putting it back together, if we can do that, won’t happen overnight. Neither will it be fixed if a war comes along. CBK
“The chickens’ plight makes me want to cry.” Given the lives they lead in these industrial operations, killing them all immediately is relatively merciful. In battery hen egg-producing operations, the wires of the cages they spend their lives in grow into the chickens’ feet. Those cages are about the size of a piece of notebook paper. Employees have to wear gas masks because of the toxic air from all that excrement. The male chicks (those cute ones you see pics of at Easter) are put into trash bags, which are tied off to suffocate them, or are fed, alive, to grinding machines because males don’t produce eggs. This is how one produces billions and billions of cheap eggs every year.
Trump has totally forgotten that he is president over EVERY state, not just the ones who have governors that bow and grovel to be in his good graces.
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Chicago Tribune:
After initially backing federal aid to states, Trump questions ‘bailing out poorly run states’ like Illinois
As talk in Washington has swiftly moved to the next coronavirus relief package, President Donald Trump on Monday questioned why federal taxpayers should come to the aid of “poorly run” states and cities run by Democrats, specifically citing Illinois.
So. F—ked. Up.
These are commercial farmers, and if there were a shortage of these products in regular grocery stores, it would be difficult to supply grocery stores due to them not having existing vendor relationships with them. That’s why there is a shortage of toilet paper. The commercial factories are full because businesses, schools, etc. are closed while the consumer factories can’t keep up with demand of families spending more time at home. (Who wants to use the toilet paper from public places at home? It’s like cardboard.) Different vendors. Different equipment. I would think food would be a little easier to transfer to the consumer side though.
Anyway, Publix, a Southern grocery chain, is buying from some of these farmers and donating to food banks. But that’s only 7 states. However, like the senior hours, I’m sure others will catch on and many big regional and national grocers will end up doing the same.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/23/843300677/supermarket-steps-up-to-buy-from-farmers-dairies-and-donate-to-food-banks
It’s interesting that there is effectively a surplus of eggs and milk. Meanwhile, a dozen conventional store brand eggs at Publix in my part of Florida was $2.60 this past weekend and conventional, store brand milk has been $4+ a gallon for months.
How grotesque. I do not see beauty in this house.
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Growing Up Trump: Inside The Family’s $19.5M Estate | Forbes
Jul 17, 2014
FORBES goes inside the Trump family’s 50,000 square-foot mansion in Westchester, NY. Eric Trump takes us through the history of his childhood property that was once owned by a Washington Post publisher and subsequently Rockefeller University.
The domicile of an emperor!
Dumbocile of a naked emperor.
Fixed.
Trump got the big test of his Presidency. And he failed. Utterly, completely, catastrophically. And, of course, entirely predictably.
BTW, there are reports today that 2020 is on track to be the hottest year on record. Something else the Trump maladministration has denied and done worse than nothing about.
Maybe Trump is counting on a heat wave to cure the virus.
Diane HEAT! What a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?
Uh . . . BTW, I have this pill you can purchase . . . . CBK
Catherine King: HEAT…that has to be the newest cure. It’s much better than drinking a quart of Clorox.
uhhh. Heat is working so well to cut down COVID-19 in Florida, Singapore and Malaysia.
carolmalaysia No, no no. You got it wrong. Don’t drink bleach. You are supposed to inject it in your veins. We’ve come a long way, baby. CBK
I’m sure these numbers don’t include people who died in their homes or drop dead in the streets. Why in the world does Trump feel that the economy is now ready to open up? He doesn’t listen to medical experts because his magnificent gut is SO much smarter. Now he can brag that we ‘STILL ARE #1″…in deaths and confirmed cases.
[Yes, Catherine King, we should now shoot up Clorox in our veins. Think of how many deaths would have been prevented by this ingenious endeavor that is so simple.]
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U.S. Surpasses 1 Million Coronavirus Cases
The U.S. now has more than 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 57,000 deaths, just months after the coronavirus was identified.
The U.S. on Tuesday reached a total of 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases — now representing nearly a third of all the confirmed cases worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 1,002,459 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and four U.S. territories, have tested positive for the virus, according to a New York Times database.
The U.S. also has the world’s highest death toll from the virus, with more than 56,700 deaths reported by Tuesday afternoon — more than one-quarter of the 213,000 deaths confirmed around the world.
Trump should be the first one to volunteer to work in the meat production plants. HE doesn’t care about workers who will die. How many hospitals has he visited, or how many nursing homes? Will they really get the protective gear? Nurses and doctors are dying from lack of protective gear.
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Trump to order meat plants to stay open in pandemic, source says. Thousands of workers already sickened by covid-19.
Meat plants will be declared “critical infrastructure” for their role in the nation’s food supply even as many become virus hot spots
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order Tuesday mandating that meat production plants remain open to head off a food supply shortage, according to one person familiar with the coming action, despite mounting reports of plant worker deaths due to covid.
Trump will invoke the Defense Production Act under the order, which will classify the meat production plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open, said the person, who was not authorized to disclose details of the order. The government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance, according to the person. Trump is expected to sign the order, first reported by Bloomberg, as early as today…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/28/trump-meat-plants-dpa/
U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for Trump in January and February.
I have lived in Delaware my whole life and I have never seen or heard of the type of chicken house situation you mentioned. There may be some chicken situations like what you say, but it’s not the norm. There are chicken houses next to my in-laws, and all over Kent county. Chickens touch the ground and lights are not on 24/7. Again, this situation may exist, but it’s not the norm on the Delmarva Peninsula.
I’ve signed petitions against what McDonalds is doing to chickens but don’t know if their practices have changed. The video below was from 2011.
The Cruelest of All Factory Farm Products: Eggs From Caged Hens
Battery cages are small wire cages where about 95 percent of laying hens spend their entire lives; each hen is given about 67-76 square inches of space (a standard sheet of paper measures 94 square inches). To get a sense of a hen’s life in a battery cage, imagine spending your entire life in a wire cage the size of your bathtub with four other people. You wouldn’t be able to move, so your muscles and bones would deteriorate. Your feet would become lacerated. You would go insane. That’s precisely what happens to laying hens.
In the United States, roughly nine billion chickens, pigs and other farm animals are consumed annually, and the vast majority of them are abused in ways that would warrant felony cruelty to animals charges were dogs or cats the victims. But three systems are particularly cruel — gestation crates for pregnant pigs, veal crates for calves, and battery cages for laying hens. As of Jan. 1, all three are illegal across Europe, and it is past time for the United States and Canada to follow suit…
Article: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-friedrich/eggs-from-caged-hens_b_2458525.html?ncid=engmodushpmg00000006
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McDonald’s Cruelty: The Rotten Truth About Egg McMuffins
A new Mercy For Animals undercover investigation into a McDonald’s egg supplier exposes the fast-food giant’s secret ingredient: shocking cruelty to animals.
California passed a law regulating the space that must be provided for chickens.
I’m sorry you have not seen the factory farms in Delmarva. I drove through while on vacation. Driving at night, I saw the tall chicken coops with lights on. I grew up in a household that kept chickens so I recognized them. At the bed and breakfast where I stayed—I think it was in St. Michael’s—I asked the owner why the lights were on at night, and she explained that the lights were on 24/7 to make the chickens grow faster. I don’t know whether the chickens grow faster if the lights burn all the time, but they were in. You might want to rent the documentary “Food Inc.” to learn more about agribusiness.
Never been to St. Michael’s, it’s in Maryland. Hope you enjoyed it, for the most part.
Republican governors are SO anxious to open up their states. Even according to Trump’s own plan [not written by him] the numbers are supposed to be going down for 14 days before anything gets opened up.
Total U.S. coronavirus deaths reported each morning this week: Monday, 54,877. Tuesday, 56,253. Wednesday, 58,355. Thursday, 60,999. Friday, 63,019.
I live in South Dakota. Our governor is so far up Trump’s ass that she never even gave a close order.
How about this comment from a Trump supporter:
My fine woman friend, I tend to disagree with you, however I don’t buy the panic that the mainstream media is pushing. That’s the way they get and keep their viewers. I do not listen to them. There are other more neutral and not po!itically motivated news sources that I listen to. I want the facts, not opinions which is what we get on the networks.
I think we are involved in a denial of national proportions. CBK
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