By Ava Springstun
Senior, English Major, IUPUI
From milk being dumped to meat going bad, perhaps the greatest untold story of the pandemic lies not in shortages; but in surplus.
Farmers across the world are being impacted by the pandemic. Whether it’s a family dairy operation, or a large scale beef supplier, the ripple effects of COVID-19 have become tsunami waves in the world of agriculture. With all the shortages being discussed in newspapers and media outlets, it’s surprising how little is being spoken about the agricultural community and the surpluses it faces.
To shed some light on this untold story of the pandemic, I sat down with my father, Mark Springstun, a third-generation beef and crop farmer in Dale, Indiana, and asked his thoughts about the impacts COVID-19 has had on his 330-acre farm in Southwest Indiana, and small-town farms across the nations.
Perhaps the first thing you should know about my father is that he holds three jobs. First and foremost, he is a father. Next, he is a full time farmer. Last, he holds a full time 40 hour a week position as a maintenance man at a local factory working night shifts. With all of this to juggle, a pandemic was the absolute last thing he needed. In this regard, my father is one of many in the agricultural community struggling to make a living in the middle of a pandemic.
According to the USDA, there are roughly 2 million farmers in the United States alone. The average farm size is 440 acres, spanning from cash crop to livestock and fisheries. Many of these farmers faced the pandemic head on at the start of the 2020 planting season. For my father and his 330 acres, some changes, however small, caused a number of disturbances to his field work.
“Spring 2020 was different because when we (farmers) would go to get our inputs such as fertilizers and anhydrase, things like that, we weren't allowed to have any direct contact with our salesman,” my father explained. “During the growing season, you know you are allowed to be in close contact but you couldn't actually go into the facilities you needed and it was a pretty big inconvenience.”
Without the face-to-face contact, my father, along with many others, was isolated by more than a lockdown quarantine order. Unable to reach out across the community, farmers were forced to be more independent than ever. Even with families supporting them, the agriculture community began to feel less like a community.
“COVID shut so many of the processing plants down to where it restricted the flow of animals that were going to the processing plant because COVID was going through the area. Even the turkey factory at Huntingburg suffered. They couldn’t get turkeys and beef and hogs processed even though there was still an abundant supply of beef to be taken to market.”
My father, a beef farmer, was perhaps a lucky one. While his income is balanced between cash crops and beef and sheep sales, previous sales in 2019 had left him with few livestock ready for market during the pandemic. For others, whose goods were ready to ship and sell, news of local surpluses were overshadowed by national headlines of shortages.
The issues spread to unexpected areas, as well.
“For the dairy farmer, when the schools were all shut down the milk bottling facilities were geared up to bottle milk to be delivered to schools in small cartons,” my father said. When the schools shut down, dairy farmers weren’t equipped to change their bottling facility fast enough to accommodate.”
While milk was a popular item in supermarkets, the farmers who had ties to bottling factories that supplied milk to schools were left with no other option than to dump their products. Likewise, butcher shops that sold to restaurants and schools watched helplessly as their product spoiled and was tossed out, only to stock more that would suffer the same fate. Grocery stores in need of milk and meat were left in the dust as butcher shops and bottling factories struggled to adjust their manufacturing to fulfil the rising shortages.
Another struggle would strike my family in particular. In early 2020, at the height of the planting season, my father faced the fear of being unemployed at his full time night maintenance job. With workers accepting the reality of being laid off, my father maintained his role as head of maintenance. Despite losing a few of his workers, he returned night after night for his shift. In 2020, all of Indiana faced the harsh reality of a pandemic when the state rose to an unemployment rate of 7.1%, the highest the state has faced since 2009. This added stress, coupled with the uncertainties of his projected 2020 harvest, resulted in a lot of long days and sleepless nights.
These feelings were felt across the community. More and more farmers began to worry about the crops they were planting and the animals they were raising. Growing market prices and the demand for fresh meat placed an enormous burden on farmers who were asked to fulfil these demands.
Farmers who weren’t as fortunate as my father because they had a number of market-ready livestock found themselves unable to wait in hour long lines (due to the increasing demands of their farm work load) to attempt to sell on a day when the butchers were open. Taking in so many animals at one time temporarily stalled butcher shops near Dale, creating waiting lists to have an animal processed (both selling and buying) that would take months to fulfil. My family purchased a market steer from a family friend to support their income and fill our freezers with fresh meat.
At the start of 2021, when my father’s sheep grew ready for market, he was forced to drive nearly three hours to a market that was willing to take the quantity of sheep he was selling. Having the markets open with the demands for fresh meat still in effect, my father received a reasonable price for sheep that may have otherwise not been offered.
This story isn’t without hope though. As my father says,
“I think if those that are healthy continue to go to work and are healthy enough to do their work efficiently, things will continue to flow through the market and we’ll come through this. Our workforce has to keep pushing to get through this and I think it will.”