We have warned that a rash of COVID-19 outbreaks at dozens of meatpacking plants across the country has quickly transformed into a crisis. Around 150 of these facilities operate within counties where virus cases and deaths are exceptionally high.
An outbreak of the virus has been reported at many of these processing plants, resulting in the closure of at least eight major ones in the last two weeks.
very virus-related meat processing plant closure reduces the ability of local farmers to sell their animals at the market, now is leading to herd overcapacity at farms and resulting in hundreds of thousands of hogs that are about to be culled.
We noted on Thursday (April 23) that the latest closure of processing plants has shifted at least 15% of US’ hog-slaughtering capacity offline. Farmers in Minnesota are preparing to cull upwards of 200,000 pigs by the first or second week of May.
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By now, it should be obvious the evolution of the virus crisis could trigger food shortages across the country at a time when an economic depression is unfolding with 26 million people out of work in five weeks. This all means the unraveling of social fabric is ahead.
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Options?
David DeGerolamo
The only reason this becomes a crisis is because of regulations that prohibit home slaughter for commercial resale. While farmers may not want to slaughter and butcher their own animals, most farmers would roll up their sleeves and do that job in preference to losing their farm. If President Trump can get the red tape cut as he has done for medical supplies and treatments, there should be no reason it can’t happen for the food supply chain as well. If in addition, waivers of liability were also brought in that enabled not only on farm processing, but for workers to be brought in on a ‘training’ or apprenticeship basis, the population of people that would end up with the skills to contribute to local food production initiatives would go up and be a silver lining to that rain cloud.
Let’s be clear -- 80% of the population are only knocked out for 2 weeks or so -- no worse. For that 80% than the seasonal flu, and once they had recovered, they could go back to work.
And this means what?? You have not supplied enough information to do anything but create panic and fear. What is the purpose of this post??
Maybe you should read the entire post at Zerohedge linked on this post.
I did read the balance of the article. Read some history and you will see this bull crap has happened before. The farmer is supported in so many ways that it is difficult to fail. I live in farm country and am personally tired of seeing the same old crap played. An acre of land is worth 10k plus. Price supports for farming have been perminately in place since the mid 20’s. Just like large corperations large farms don’t pay taxes they absorb our, tax payers, money. Time to burn the house down folks.
We are a prepper household. We bought beans in 20lb. bags at wallyworld. They are cheap. Energy is cheap and plentiful right now. So we bought canning jars and a pressure caner. We canned beans with bacon end pieces for flavor AND fats (calorie dense). I learned in E&E school fats were difficult to find in nature. You need fats to be healthy. We have about 150 quarts stored. Add enough rice to make complete protein meals. But that would get old fast even with the dozen different condiments (Frank’s, Tiger Sauce, Dave’s Insanity, chow chow, sweet and dill relish,etc),
So the option is to pressure can meats and chicken (I hate turkey) right NOW!. Meat is currently cheap (relatively). Energy is currently cheap AND plentiful as noted. So get canning. It’s not rocket science. The Ball Book has everything you need to know and step by step instructions. We pressure can ground meat, meat loaf, stew meat, steak chunks, chicken bone in and boneless breast chunks, ground chicken, ham chunks, ground pork, sausages (both patty and link), bacon, mixed ground chicken and pork and finally pork fat. We can these in pint jars (except bacon in quart jars. Mmmmm bacon). We have enough to last a year or two and three maybe four if we ration. Then it’s on to freeze dried (very expensive). After that it’s rice and beans and what ever we can find. We have a full deep freezer but do not like to depend on electricity. We have enough supplies to can that too, along with enough propane to process it, but as long as the lights come on we will eat that first.
Why would anybody eat pig meat in the first place? Yuk!