Why Millions Of Potatoes Are Being Thrown Away During The Pandemic | Big Business

these potatoes aren't going to end up on your dinner table their final destination is this hole we're in the small town of Sheridan Montana on a potato farm normally this time of year bill and Peggy would be sending their potatoes to be planted instead they're throwing away 700 tons the potatoes have been awful good to us for a lot of years but this year it just really turned sour and the same thing is happening across the northwest I mean it was just unprecedented it's the supply chain from the growers to the supermarket that got interrupted more than half of our market shut down by government mandate now farmers across Idaho and Montana are stuck with mountains of potatoes so why did this all happen we visited boo-yan ranch where Peggy and Bill have been growing potato seed for 59 years normally a potato production across the northwest looks like this it starts with a seed grower like boo young where farmers grow a variety of seed strains virtually all the potatoes grown started out from a certified seed nut that's a fairly rigorous process that avoids disease imperfections boo-yan grows three different disease free seed strains Umatilla clear water and russet Burbank potatoes each potato variety goes to a specific grower in either the fresh or processed segments in the fresh segment you're actually seeing the potato in its true form that's foods like a raw potato at a grocery store or a gratin potatoes at your favorite restaurant the other side of that is because we call it our process segment you don't actually see the potato you see the byproduct or the end result of that that's the bag of potato chips the french fries at McDonald's or the pre-cut fries in the frozen section if you're a fresh product grower you'll plan a different variety or a different genetic line of potatoes if your process grower you'll grow a different product line just some fry better they have a better color to them others drill better now back to the farm potato growers get the seed from boo-yan and start planting in March then they harvest in early fall once the potatoes are out of the ground they go into storage or are sent to a factory where they're cleaned and turned into either fresh or processed potatoes when kovat hit we had a huge run on retail which lasted for about a week to two weeks but then when we shut off all the restaurants that's when everything came out of kilter potatoes for foodservice like restaurants hotels and catering make up an estimated 55 percent of all potato crops think of everything from white table restaurants cleared out your fast quick service so when food service establishments shut down because of Coppa 19 it was a chain effect processors cut down orders with growers out of options the growers cut their orders with seed farmers and more than half of the industry's potatoes were stranded on seed farms in Peggy's case her customers in Washington were cut back more than 50% and she and Bill were stuck with tons of seed they normally sell you can't take these some of these facilities that are built directly for food service and then tomorrow flip a switch and make them able to sell into retail you're asking a square peg in a round hole I guess is the best analogy I can come up with the surplus potatoes also couldn't just be sent to grocery stores grocery stores a retails would have been bursting the seams with potatoes if we redirected all that we had high hopes and maybe something would turn up you know that in a month or so we might be able to send them somewhere for some kind of processing but this years there's just no no market for them we're just taking them out taking them into a very old pit Peggy and Bill have been forced to bury 1.4 million pounds of potatoes in total it's costing us money just to bury these I mean between our time and labor and renting a large excavator to dig the hole and and cover them it's gets it I mean it's it's not free just to throw them away to us it's it's an expense just to get rid of when you dump that many potatoes the financial hit yeah I mean that was what so heart sickening is the financial very it takes a tremendous amount of capital to draw a crop of potatoes bankruptcies are starting to creep up before the pandemic Zack estimates Idaho farmers were looking at a 15-year high in potato prices now they're facing a 20-year low Zach says a hundred pound sack of potatoes went from costing about twelve dollars a sack to three dollars a sack and a farmer needs it to cost at least five dollars to break-even Peggy and Bill are facing one hundred and forty thousand dollars in losses for farmers across Idaho and Montana that number comes to eight million dollars some of these farmers are looking at red all over their balance sheet and there's no black to be seen they'll be looking into increasing their lines of credit they'll be needing to remortgage some of their property you know just trying to free up more capital to try and survive for next year when you put all your work and effort into growing them and the expanse and the pride of what your girl and then to just completely just throw it away and waste it to save some of the potatoes from going to waste we on ranch got creative Peggy and Bill have given out roughly seventy five thousand pounds of potatoes to the surrounding community he's organizing two or three giveaway days and we've had pickups from hundred miles away people come and got potatoes she's distribute them down on our street in town just set up and people stop they give him a bag of potatoes and just to try to get somebody benefit from them even though they're losing money on them they'd rather see someone eating than that nothing happened at all farmers are also mashing up potatoes into a compost like mixture to feed cattle next year we've put them into this pile and mixed straw then we're gonna put plastic over the top of it and let it get totally broke down by next fall at that point if everything is okay and the rations then we'll start feeding the calves with it's money out of our pocket trying to find another use of the dispose but all of that effort barely made a dent in the number of stranded potatoes right now it's like 200,000 roughly and there with everything I would say it's pretty devastating you know for a small operation for us all in all an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of potatoes are trapped in the supply chain across the u.s. if I was advising a year ago not knowing what was gonna happen I would have told them to do anything differently they didn't know if we'd have anticipated Kovich wrong and had a short drop a very small crop it would have been devastated to food hunger we've had mass shortage of potatoes and that would have been even worse luckily Zach says all this food waste won't lead to a shortage next year farmers are still planning potatoes just not as much going forward this year I think the farmers doing the right thing we thought you know let's plant what we do and take the risk we already have the ground prepared and we have we raised our most of our own seed and buy some so I mean you might as well just carry on I guess that's kind of the farm and ranch bad years you just start over the next year and hope for a better you know better season if if you didn't you to quit a long time ago that's the plight of a farmer we're always looking for next year farmers Farms for the love of farming and even in tough times we still will continue to farm for the love of farming you

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 7,059,719

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, potato, pandemic, agriculture, farming, farm, vegetables, waste, big business

Id: ALtfQVbHtM0

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Yorkshire80]

Potato farmers in Idaho and Montana are destroying millions of potatoes. Restaurant closures because of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a glut, and now, billions of pounds of potatoes are stuck in the supply chain. It's caused unprecedented financial losses, food waste, and emotional turmoil for farmers whose livelihood depends on their crops.

[u/icklefluffybunny42]

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The dustbowl era of the 1930s...The more things change...

[u/[deleted]]

Emergencies are when central planning excels, which is why America will the worst hit developed nation.

[u/happygloaming]

Go capitalism, that is so ridiculous.

[u/[deleted]]

Since the government is rolling in cash to the point where they can print off money to help huge corporations, why not just print off more and purchase the goods from the farmers? Then give them to the food banks.

[u/Le_Gitzen]

“When you dump that many potatoes- it was the financial hit. I mean that’s what was so heart sickening- is the financial hit”

That is exactly the phrase which is so sickening about capitalism. The loss of so much food wasn’t what was tragic; it was the loss of profit. I wish there was a better system so honest people didn’t have to rely on such a sick pyramid scheme that relied on invented contrived wealth over real tangible goods.

[u/thegeebeebee]

cApiTalIzm iS gRaTe fOr HuManItY bEcuZ MaRketS aRe eFFiCienT!

[u/Uncle_Leo93]

If I can't turn these mud rocks into money then what good are they?

[u/FP2045]

"my taters! My money! fuck them starving people!"