In typical times, the bulk bagging machine in Owyhee Produce’s packing center spins 50,000 onions– red, yellow, and white ones– into orange netted bags each hour. The bags go to a fruit and vegetables supplier and then to a food-service organisation: a restaurant chain like Applebee’s or Chili’s, a baseball park, a university dining hall.
The bulk bagger at Owyhee Produce, an onion, asparagus, and mint farm straddling the Oregon– Idaho border, isn’t getting much action nowadays. Most food service locations are closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders. Distributors are struggling to reroute fruit and vegetables prior to it spoils. Farmers are grappling with hiccups in the supply chain and are searching for consumers to take their crop.
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Americans still have to consume during a pandemic. However they’re consuming differently: less at dining establishments and cafeterias, more in your home. Changing where a farm’s output goes is easier said than done. Individuals who plant, slaughter, process, pack, and move it aren’t sure what’s next.
More than 60 percent of Owyhee’s 800 acres of onions usually end up in food service. This month, the operation dumped about 1 million onions– part of in 2015’s crop, which was gathered in the fall. Shay Myers, the farm’s general manager, says the reason was simple: No one would purchase them.
Comparable scenes are playing out all over the nation: fields of leafy greens generally bound for dining establishments raked under or delegated rot; fresh milk, once predestined for dairy processors who package it in small cartons for school kids, put down drains. Grocery and benefit shops are working to keep some items in stock, and food banks grapple with feeding the surge of out-of-work Americans.
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