usken65 wrote:
Really. Food production is strong? Why is there a meat shortage? Why are farmers plowing crops under? Why are store shelves empty?
Haven't you seen the news shows of farmers dumping milk, potatoes etc? The processing plants are either closed or working at reduced capacity so they can't sell the stuff before it spoils. I saw a picture of one potato farmer with a dump truck full who went into a paved area in town and just dumped the potatoes for anyone who wanted them.
As to meat, esp beef, chicken etc. The processing plants that are open can't handle the volume, so the buyers aren't buying and transporting the animals and the farmers/ranchers lose money feeding etc and are worried they will have to start killing and burying the animals to slow down the march towards being bankrupt.
The bottle neck is the processing plants - to operate the workers have to be close and sickness can spread easily with all those workers close to each other in an enclosed area so the plants are closed or operating at minimum capacity.
The farmers and ranchers are producing, the truckers and railroads are transporting, the stores have people to stock shelves etc - with precautions but the middle of the food chain - processing plants - are not working as they should.
One report I read said a lot of the big processing plants are now owned by international corps and they are bringing in meat from their operations in other countries instead of buying US grown animals, at increased prices with the shortage that is just getting started while the plants that process American produced animals are shut or at reduced capacity.
Just like the meds and protective gear for medical people, the supply chain came to depend on other nations. All that stuff needs to be brought back to the US, even if we do have to pay a bit more due to the higher wages here.
There is a plant in, I believe it was Texas, that makes protective gear, esp N95 masks that has production lines shut down and the owner (he worked there when it used to be at full capacity and formed a partnership to buy it, then the wholesalers etc started buying from other countries) has been trying to get the government to finance him getting his plant up to full capacity again, (reconditioning the machines and training more workers will be expensive) but they ignore him. He is producing at about 1/4 capacity and selling N95 masks for less than $1 each while some states etc are paying 2-5 dollars for imported masks, China esp is gouging on the prices and some of their masks are such crap that when tested masks labeled N95 are sometimes only N20 or N25 in the real world.
We need to bring the production capacity back to the US and our territories. Modernize our plants for safety etc and just swallow any higher prices - it beats being at the mercy of nations like China for vital things. And I am willing to bet that with new processes, better machines and computer/robot controlled production - by workers trained to operate them making better wages we could get the prices back down and maybe even lower than before through volume etc.