Since the shutdown of much of the U.S. economy in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus, domestic demand for farm products of all kinds has plummeted. Stay-at-home orders by state governors and state and local closings of schools and “nonessential” businesses, uniformly including dine-in restaurants, have deprived the food-service industry of nearly all of its customers, and many smaller food-service businesses have been, or soon will be, permanently closed. Not surprisingly, farmers are also suffering, because food processors, manufacturers, and distributors are not buying their products in anything like the amounts they did only a couple of months ago. Farmers now find themselves with much more fruit, vegetables, milk, and eggs than they can possibly sell in a timely manner, and many of them are facing bankruptcy.
As news reports have noted, most farmers would rather donate their excess production to charity (e.g., to foodbanks and Meals on Wheels) than simply destroy it. But many of them were in difficult financial circumstances to begin with, and the current decimation of the food-service industry has only made their condition worse. Farmers generally cannot afford to harvest and transport their excess production to charities; nor can charities themselves cover that cost, because they have only modest operating budgets. Even if farmers could deliver their excess production, charities could absorb only a small portion of it, because they lack sufficient storage capacity.
That is why farmers were dumping 3.7 million of gallons of milk and destroying millions of pounds of ripe produce every day in early April, even as families across the country were struggling to feed themselves. Partly because dairy farmers have since reduced production, the volume of milk being dumped every day has declined to about 1.6 million gallons, according to Dairy Farmers of America, a national cooperative.
To address this problem, the Trump administration and some state governments have recently announced programs to purchase some surplus production from farmers and distributors and transport it to foodbanks and charities, and a grassroots organization, FarmLink, has helped to ship surplus production directly from farms.
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