Now that Jayden has been preparing to return to Oklahoma, she has been herself; happy, silly, fun and smiling all week. She is happy to be going back to Alva. She has been packing and getting her trailer all tuned up, cleaned up, and packed. I am not excited for her to leave. I love having her home. She brings a kind of joy to each day that we all need. I like having her here where I know that she is safe. I just wish she could wait until we know this COVID thing has fazed out, but at the same time I wonder when that will ever happen. What if this is the new normal? What a horrible thought! To be prisoners in our own homes, completely controlled by the government and at their complete will. Ugh, that is a terrible thought. I pray it never happens.
Farmers are impacted by everything. The markets are dropping and prices are too. IT's planting season and once again the farmers get to work putting in long hours and labor. Knowing what prices are doing, sure makes it hard to be excited or motivated to keep going.
Farmers are impacted by everything. The markets are dropping and prices are too. IT's planting season and once again the farmers get to work putting in long hours and labor. Knowing what prices are doing, sure makes it hard to be excited or motivated to keep going.
The effects of COVID on agriculture are being seen in all the industry. This is from a dairy farming article.
From high-end restaurants to fast food chains, fewer people are eating out and instead, staying at home due to stay-at-home orders. In turn, those consumers are eating fewer pounds of key items like butter and cheese. Therefore, a portion of the nation’s milk supply is without a home. The decline in the food service business has not been offset by the increase in the retail side of business,” says Michael Dykes, . “Overnight, we saw a paradigm shift and the business turned upside down.” The lack of demand from the food service industry is so severe, it’s overshadowing the increase in demand at local grocery stores. From dairy farmers with nowhere to send their milk and cattle ranchers reeling from plummeting beef prices, the impact of the coronavirus is rippling through farm country. Corn, cotton and soybean futures have tumbled, ethanol plants have been idled, and some fruit and vegetable farmers are finding their best option is leaving produce in the field.Price forecasts for most agricultural products are bleak. In the past month, dairy prices have dropped 26-36%, corn futures have dropped by 14%, soybean futures are down 8% and cotton futures have plummeted 31%. Hog futures are down by 31%. A surge in demand for beef emptied grocery store meat aisles, but there is no lack of supply. Despite a rise in retail prices in some areas, the prices paid to cattle ranchers have fallen 25%.
COVID has hit the meat packing plants creating more problems.
(Internet source) Iowa had its largest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases Sunday, driven largely by new positive tests at meatpacking plants. State officials said 261 of the 389 new cases of COVID-19 reported Sunday were discovered as part of testing done at Iowa meat processing plants.The spike comes one day after Iowa recorded its most COVID-19-related deaths in a single day. Ten additional deaths of Iowans were reported Saturday, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. The state recorded one additional death on Sunday.Officials tested more than 1,000 meatpacking employees at Tyson Foods and National Beef Packing Co. — 84 Tyson employees and 177 National Beef workers tested positive for the virus. In addition the closing of so many packing plants is creating a huge problem for livestock producers. They have animals ready for market, and nowhere to take them. Producers are stuck with the animals they need to sell. Some large pork producers are getting rid of animals. They cant afford to keep feeding them when they cannot sell them. From producer to table, on the consumer end there is not enough meat. It is a sad reality and things are going to get worse. Farmers say that plummeting pork prices might force them to euthanize baby pigs to cut losses.Hog farmers are struggling in the face of absent workers, and a loss of buyers in restaurants and international markets due to the coronavirus pandemic.The result is a glut of excess hogs, making it more expensive to sell pigs to be made into pork than to simply kill the animals. The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) said on Tuesday that farmers will lose almost $37 per hog and almost $5 billion collectively for every hog marketed for the rest of 2020, citing economists Dr. Dermot Hayes and Dr. Steve Meyer. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the NPPC said analysts predicted farmers would earn roughly $10 per hog.
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