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.
The result: a national processing capacity that’s been diminished by more than 100,000 pigs per day, said David Preisler, CEO of the Minnesota Pork Board. The crunch is felt acutely in Minnesota, the country’s second-highest pork producing state, where farmers are taking a financial hit.

Yet beyond the money, plant shutdowns are forcing some farmers to consider an unfortunate last resort to ease their backlog of hogs: putting them down. Preisler said farmers may have to kill and dispose of 200,000 pigs in the state that can’t reach the market over the next few weeks. “You reach a point where you have to make a decision on things,” Preisler said. “And that’s unfortunately where we’re at right now.”

A backup builds
About half of pigs raised in Minnesota are processed in Minnesota, and the other half go to packing plants in neighboring states — primarily Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri. The average farm has about 2,400 hogs, Preisler said.