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

[riversedge]

A tractor mulches green beans at an R.C. Hatton farm in Florida. “It’s heartbreaking,” an owner of the farm said.Credit...Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

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

With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms are destroying millions of pounds of fresh goods that they can no longer sell.

A tractor mulches green beans at an R.C. Hatton farm in Florida. “It’s heartbreaking,” an owner of the farm said.Credit...Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

By David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery

April 11, 2020

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.................................

[mr_lebowski]

1. Given that people presumably must still eat roughly the same amount ...

And we've not (yet) lost millions of people to the virus, seems logical to presume that all this food would go to waste either way ... it's just being done at a different part of the supply chain.

Still sad, of course.

[bubbazero]

2. YOU ARE CORRECT SIR AND THANK YOU

As a farmer who has also worked in the industrial food chain as tech, equipment specialist, I can tell you we are now seeing what has been the food supply chains dirty little secret. An enormous chunk of food is quite literally wasted, particularly in the commercial institutional serving steps.. Restaurants, bars, institutions of all kinds are known to be startling poor in their efficiency of food consumed as apposed to food prepared. This has been true for DECADES! In the livestock business many leftover, and waste food products would become animal feed if volume was high enough. Think choice white grease as a prime example. Regulations have changed for good safety reasons, so not as common today. Some institutions and large restaurants have taken steps to give wastes and leftovers to farmers and processors for composting etc.--a growing practice in college dorm situations etc. All an example of how much food is wasted thru restaurants, bars, commercial and institutional serving as compared to home serving where leftovers are often used. Thank god for microwaves. Though we may see regional shortages due to virus, food chain will continue to function. Some plant closures, especially meat, though cause may be virus in workforce, but profit margins were thin or nonexistent due to TRUMPS trade war. It's one thing to operate at breakeven, but when workforce goes out, driving up inefficient production, losses become greater than closing for a while. Pork has been particularly hard hit. Prices in retail stores reflected low prices for basic commodity. When waste is down, and actual consumption remains roughly the same, the end result will be too much supply and a loss of markets for many producers. ................Sorry, too wet to work in fields today, and mom's napping now.

[Chainfire]

3. It shows a lack of flexibility of the food distribution system

Food being destroyed while people are lining up by the thousands at food banks.

A little creative energy and a little less greed would be very helpful in an emergency......

Corporate farmers would rather plow their food into the ground than give it away to the hungry. It is a shame, a damned shame.

[soryang]

4. Could be a couple of factors at work

just in time formula for shipments can't be adjusted without visibility of future market patterns, let alone current ones.

there is a shortage of transportation assets, like drivers, because the spotty nature of the old logistics pattern leaves huge gaps in delivery schedules. it's just not profitable for drivers to take loads. who is going to go out on an OTR run to drive 250 mi in three days? This happened in the 2008 financial crisis but had more to do with the loss of trust in bank credit markets, namely receiving payment on loads.

people at home, will not necessarily be buying as much food as before because they are unemployed.

receiving docks are adversely affected by personnel out sick. So loaded trailers are just sitting in some yards. in fact, the conditions at receiving docks are subject to wildcat labor disputes.

One major transportation company is recruiting which is unheard of during a normal economy. But i think these reflect the increased local runs at the retail end, ie, the Amazon market.

note: all comments based on anecdotal reports from people in the business.

[Blue Owl]

5. This sounds like a Donald Trumper Tantrum

Who let baby in the kitchen?