Posted on 04/22/2020 10:56:32 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Kerry Mergen, a contract egg farmer near Albany, Minn., got word on a Wednesday the chickens in his barn would be euthanized. A crew showed up the next morning and started gassing the birds with carbon dioxide.
The sudden drop in demand for food at restaurants, school cafeterias and caterers shut down by the pandemic has ripped through farming. Milk has been dumped, eggs smashed and ripe lettuce plowed under. Now, farms are killing animals sooner than planned.
Mergen said he initially couldn’t believe it when a field manager from Daybreak Foods, the Lake Mills, Wis.-based firm that owned and paid to feed the flock of 61,000 birds, said they might be killed early. His contract called for the flock to produce eggs until fall. “I was wrong and the company decided to do it anyway,” Mergen said.
A primary destination for eggs from the flock — a Cargill Inc. fluid egg plant in Big Lake, Minn. — temporarily shut down last week and laid off 300 employees there. The company cited declining demand for the decision to idle the facility, which handles 800 million eggs a year and sends containers of fluid egg to food-service companies across North America.
Demand for eggs in grocery stores is high and the price of a dozen eggs has risen. But much of the egg-production system is built to provide fluid eggs to food service companies and changing farms to provide eggs for retail is neither simple nor quick.
Mergen said his was one of five egg farms where chickens were euthanized in Minnesota in recent weeks, and that the other four were larger than his farm.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Then it wouldn't be easy finding new outlets. They're chicken-farmers, not salesmen.
Note: I'm not arguing with you here. LOL
I’ve done business, in a very different field, with Cargill before. They are a good company, but huge. Highly legalist and bureaucratic, but when you have 100K employees, and such massive commodity-price risk, its really the only way. For them “re-tooling” would mean 2 months of planning and discussion, engineering analysis, preparing a budget, approval, etc… they would be ready by 2021 some time…
The bigger question for me is - what is it about our financial, economic and production system that nearly everything must have ever-increasing scale and uniformity? That while managers have been trained to be extremely clever at financial engineering, there never is consideration of “tail risks” or creating reasonable redundancy? Offshoring to China is a well-known symptom of this, but its not the only one.
The egg shelves at several local grocery stores are nearly empty.
***********
Yep.
There’s a blatant misdirection in the situation as reported.
All that cut back on restaurant and such business does *not* mean Americans quit eating. It means we quit eating at restaurants.
The demand is still there. For some, it’ll be the inability to adjust to the new market. For others, the effort is to punish Americans by screwing up the food supply as much as possible.
And if you think people can’t possibly be that evil, you haven’t been paying attention for the last few decades.
Why not just destroy the eggs they produce every day?
Thank you for that rational assessment of the problem (while others bleat “Trump should fix it!”).
No losses.
Costs money to feed them, ventilate the barn, etc.
What this shows (in part) is that the egg supply/processing chain was unable to adapt to a different mode of how buyers wanted eggs (mainly in grocery stores).
Big fail to adapt, improvise, overcome.
Sonny Purdue isn’t too concerned for some strange reason?
nice, good job!
Another subsidized bailout coming to big chicken business.
I don’t think the Politicians have a clue as to what is coming, and the anger is most likely going to be directed right at them and their Stasi protective forces.
Why yes they do! And their butter pecan is awesome.
I think that the face of the person who made the decision to kill the chickens should be posted online so we can all see what a complete idiot looks like, just for future reference.
Those hens were always destined to become pet food. They just went earlier than normal. No food went to waste. Commercial egg laying chickens are not meat chickens, they are not bred to build up muscle for meat. They are bred for egg production. Meat chickens are completely different breeds.
old egg birds are good soup birds, plus you can eat them many different ways. I find them more good then most purdues.
wouldn’t be easy:
1 800 Walmart...
Just in time for the food shortages.
maybe their cost went up?
CONTACT CARGILL
https://www.cargill.com/page/cargill-contact-us
CARGILL KILLS OFF CHICKENS ON 5 FARMS : EXPECT EGGS, CHICKEN SHORTAGES, ADDED TO MILK, PORK AND BEEF, WE ARE GETTING PAST PLANTING DATES FOR FOOD. STOP THIS MADNESS!, OPEN THE USA BACK UP, YOU THINK TP IS SCARCE, WAIT UNTIL FOOD RISES IN PRICE AND IS RATIONED. EVERYTHING CAN BE PRESERVED. MORE CON GAMES TO BANKRUPT THE USA! LOW INCOME, SENIORS WILL BE HIT THE HARDEST. IF YOU THINK IT WON’T HAPPEN TRY GOING HUNGRY SO YOU CAN FEED YOUR CHILDREN. I HAVE, NO CHILD SUPPORT, CRAP PEANUT FARMER WAGES, FREEZING TO EARN $3.50 AN HOUR.
MAD AS H!
Daybreak Foods was very happy to break its contract with the farmer with less than 24 hours notice, so it doesn’t seem like contracts are worth much these days.
The Force majeure clauses probably give the buyers an easy out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.