A tractor with a 35-foot blade mowed down one million pounds of green beans ready to be picked at R.C. Hatton’s Pahokee fields.

Those crops should have been going to South Florida’s restaurants, cruise ships, school cafeterias, airlines and even theme parks.

Instead, they are going into the ground.

“And I’ve got another one million I can’t harvest that’s going down in the next three days,” R.C. Hatton’s president Paul Allen said.

The total shutdown of the hospitality industry, to stem the spread of the coronavirus, means farmers who grew crops intended for everyone from small, independent restaurants to busy hotels are stuck with millions of pounds of produce that will soon be left to die on the vine.

And even food banks, soup kitchens and rescue missions, which have seen a surge of unemployed workers making hours-long lines for boxes of donated fresh fruits and vegetables, are saturated with farm donations.

“It’s catastrophic,” said Tony DiMare, vice president of the third-generation-owned DiMare tomato company. “It’s a dire situation, and there’s no relief in sight.”

Like many farms, DiMare’s business is split between growing produce for retail outlets like grocery stores and direct to the food-service industry.

When restaurants were ordered shut overnight, about half of his 1,300 acres of tomatoes, mostly in Homestead, had no buyers.

“You’re dealing with a perishable product,” DiMare said. “The clock is ticking.”

Unlike flour or sugar, fruits and vegetables must be harvested, boxed, shipped and sold quickly — or not at all.

With no one to buy the product, R.C. Hatton farms has made the difficult decision to plow under many of its fields.

Harvesting that fruit can cost more than twice as much as simply razing it. Workers who usually make between $15-$17 an hour, paid by the amount they pick, instead earn minimum wage doing field work.

So one million pounds of green beans and four million pounds of cabbage at R.C. Hatton will be churned into mulch in the next few days.





DiMare estimates that by the end of the growing season, about 10 million pounds of his tomatoes will go unpicked.

“It’s devastating for agriculture in Florida,” Allen said. “There’s zero demand, and it’s being left in the fields.”




One option is for the federal government to invoke the power to purchase farm product for use in assistance programs. The stimulus bill Congress passed Friday had $9.5 billion in dedicated disaster relief for farmers.

Some farms, like Pero Family Farms, have been able to reroute its specialty produce, like sweet mini peppers and organic salads, to the grocery stores who are demanding more than usual because many people are now cooking at home.

And some restaurants have even turned to selling this produce online, with local pick up and delivery. One, Threefold Cafe in Coral Gables, turned their seven-restaurant infrastructure into packaging grocery goods from farms and purveyors and selling it directly to the public.

“We have to find ways to get creative,” said Pero’s chief sales officer, Nick Bergstrom.

Farms are having trouble even giving their fruits and vegetables away.

As millions of pounds of produce threatened to go bad, growers flooded non-profit organizations. DiMare said when Walt Disney World shut its doors, the park filled the food pantries in the Orlando area.

In South Florida, even the biggest non-profits are having trouble moving the mountains of quickly ripening produce into the hands of hungry people who need it.


“The volume is at a level we’ve never seen before,” said Stephen Shelley, president and CEO of Farm Share, which partners with more than 2,000 food pantries, churches, schools and other nonprofits throughout Florida to distribute food every day.

Farm Share is running at maximum capacity, Shelley said, despite having 25 refrigerated trucks, six warehouses of between 10,000-35,000 square feet and 40-50 drop sites from Jacksonville to Florida City. They usually help more than seven million pounds of food reach the hungry and now are faced with moving a lot more.

“It is overwhelming the system,” he said.

But no one is turning away donations. DiMare donated 400,000 pounds of tomatoes last week alone and plans to donate another million pounds this week. R.C. Hatton similarly has opened up its farm to you-pick and is sending countless boxes of green beans and cabbage to food rescue charities, as much as they can take.

“We absolutely can handle it,” said Sari Vatske, executive vice president of Feeding South Florida. “We can’t get it in and out fast enough.”

The organization, which is part of the Feeding America network, is using its own fleet of trucks and more than 220 local partners to give away more than 2.5 million meals a week from Palm Beach to Monroe counties.

Meanwhile, more people than ever are relying on the donated fresh produce as thousands were laid off from the food industry in the last weeks.

Last Wednesday, a line of cars eight miles long queued up at a Farm Share site in Liberty City, where volunteers are putting groceries directly into trunks to avoid unnecessary contact. Distributions are planned throughout the week and a calendar is available online.

Feeding South Florida is seeing six times as many people coming for donations at its many locations, while its volunteer staff is just a quarter of its usual size. Many are following stay-at-home orders and are afraid of contracting the coronavirus, despite a no-contact system.

“The math is not on our side,” Vatske said.

Meanwhile, the sun sets on crops that grow another day closer to going from food to fodder.

“We have got to get this virus contained,” DiMare said, “or we are not going to get back to close to being normal.”

At least part of it is being donated. Makes you sick.

What a damn shame.



I’d give him $10 for a pickup bed full.

Long Term this is going to be bad, very bad.

Adding it all up, it must be in the billons lost. wages, taxes, all.

Hurricane Andrew gave them a pretty good beating as well and it destroyed land.

I feel bad for farmers, anyone who livelihood has been affected by this.

That's a whole lot of cabbage that could be turned into kraut with a little salt...........well, maybe a lot of salt.

Do the younger generations even eat sauerkraut?

Geno

Here where I live, there is a large Mennonite run produce auction, probably the largest in this part of the country. Many of the local Mennonite and Amish farmers grow produce, because they can do this on a much smaller acreage than if they were farming livestock or grain. It is amazing just how much produce goes through there each year. Just about every kind of vegetable and fruit you can think of is sold there. Buyers come from as far away as Chicago to buy produce, with the biggest percentage going to Nashville, and that area of Tennessee.

I have wondered what effect this is going to have on the produce auction here, especially if it lasts on into summer. I even grow some stuff myself and let the grandkids take it there to sell. IF......and who knows what's really going to happen down the road, things don't improve, a lack of a market is going to really hurt most of these produce farmers. Of course, farmers are not going to be by themselves in this, but if a large enough number of them go under, a short crop next year would likely mean higher food prices.

I don't get it. If the restaurants, Disneyworld, etc. are shut down and not buying their food, people still gotta eat. At home. Why aren't the wholesalers channelling this stuff to supermarkets?

Large hole in supply lines later on this year.

The tourist are the missing factor, they sent them all home.
Florida residents don't eat all that....

This is a supply chain/distribution problem.

The Federal Government should have recognized this and earmarked some of the USDA funds to kick start a solution. There are plenty of people who’d love fresh green beans, peppers and tomatoes all over North America. It’s just a matter of getting it to them. Tool up canneries and get this stuff preserved. If this epidemic goes on for too much longer than several months, we could have real food shortages, with no one to harvest or pack out many agricultural products.

This is not surplus. It’s not for lack of demand. We need to be thinking outside the box.

Shame on the USDA for not anticipating this.

Yes. Everyone still has to be somewhere, and I for one am still eating. Out west here, and our local stores have tons of produce.

One would think a business on that scale would have contracts well in advance with the cannery industry.

And if our restaurants etc are any indication, the food industry is still deemed an essential industry and is doing well. Just not eating at their tables. Brought home a huge bundle of Thai food last night that will probably do us for 3 evenings.

My supermarket is loaded with produce. Pretty simple, there is a net loss of the customer base.

LOL, for those that are aware, there is a long term member here that could be working on this. I'm gonna blame him for his lack of reaction......

It's the [bleep], what do you suppose is the % of homemakers today down there that know how to home can tomatoes, green beans or even how to prep and freeze those 2 vegetable's? If I lived down there I'd be filling a pantry full of the best home canned stuff I could working 18+ hrs a day to do it if necessary. MB

I think it has to do with a fresh versus processed food. Very few of today's people actually know how to fix a meal from fresh produce. They want it out of a can, or a bag, or something they can microwave., It's also a problem of everyone from producers, suppliers, retail outlets, and everyone connected to the food industry being able to coordinate and rearrange the whole process.

Also, if you believe things will soon be back to normal, then you would be hesitant to change, knowing that you'd soon have to change back. At least, that's what I think.

Exactly. Canning, dehydrating, freeze drying. Lots of ways to preserve the goods for later.

Blaming the USDA is short sighted though, this is a problem that has existed for decades.
We quit any serious civil defense measures long ago. CD isn't just about nukes.

I wasn't confining the comment to FL's agriculture alone.

That’s the core of the issue. I raise fish, and more than 75% of all fish are eaten in restaurants. Give a yuppie or most millennials a fish or a bushel of crawfish, and they won’t have the knowledge or skills to turn them into food, they are emotionally incapable of doing so.

Until they get hungry..... but I really don’t see that happening. Too many ramen noodles on the shelf yet.

People have limited funds, they have to make hard decisions. Hoard toilet paper or eat. LOL

I’m not the only farmer with little use for the USDA, but I’m not Monsanto, ADM, or Purdue.

The Cure is destroying many, many more Americans than the disease.

That's a fact.

This shutdown is NOT sustainable.

I was commenting on Fl's agriculture as was the OP.

They couldn't can the beans?

I'm puzzled...

Did people quit eating?

Maybe they ran the numbers on the stimulus bill handout and fired up the bush hogs .

That is an interesting statistic.

The only fish I have ever seen consumed in a dine in setting was battered and deep fried.

Learn something new every day.

But I would not know what to do with those crawdads either, except to put them on a hook to catch a trout or bass.

Florida sees about 110 million domestic tourist,11 million over seas tourist and about 3.5 million Canadians a season.

The peak of the season is between January and April.
They sent them all home early.
It's the fresh product that 125,000,000 people would have been eating if they were here.

Then there is the schools and restaurants that would be filled with locals stuffin their faces too if they were open, but they are not....

I'd suppose the local canneries are running full production through out the growing season here as always.
Being there is a timely matter involved with harvest and canning there is no way they could ramp up to take all that extra product all at once.

Cannery is most likely running at 120% capacity trying to resupply the warehouses supplying Kroger and Walmart.

I know that our factories and warehouses are.

Don't those Ramen Noddles originate in China? That supply should be getting short very soon. People will have to rediscover Italian style pasta.

Give me them crawdads...........and the fish..............I know what to do with them.

I'll take a few head of them cabbages from FL too.

Geno

Who was it that was talking about a "quick" recovery?????????????????

MM

I ain’t no homemaker, used to be a home builder

I do all the canning now here at the house, plant it, baby it, pick it and can it.

be sweet to get a load of it before it gets turned under

Very few canneries remain in the US. Google canneries and the number one response is fish canneries. Add the word vegetable to the search, and you begin to get an idea of how few remain. The frozen food business model has overtaken canned produce. Most frozen food companies seldom purchase open market produce. They contract directly with growers to insure sufficient product for their operations. Many US canneries, in the last 25 years, have dissembled and moved to foreign countries.

Here is just one example

https://www.opb.org/news/article/jolly-green-giant-left-town-his-image-remains/

Just come and get them, Geno, before the eagles eat them all!

Just got the word from one of my retail markets, they are shutting down. Nobody shopping for fresh food. This is going to get ugly if it keeps up.

This thing is going to kick a lot of people right between the legs.

In our growing area, the piles of good apples discarded by packing sheds, would be a surprise to most. The number one reason the apples are tossed is because they are of a size that will not retail well for a grocery store. Because of cheap imported apple juice, IE Walmart and Kroger store group, very few will ever be processed into juice. These discarded apples often end up as cow food at a dairy. A real waste because of finicky consumer behaviors.

From 2009 ;
Crooked cucumbers and co. make a European comeback
Crooked cucumbers, knobbly carrots and other strangely shaped fruit and vegetables - the stuff of EU myth, legend and ridicule is set to return to the shelves of European supermarkets.


An oddly shaped cucumber
Coming soon to European supermarkets

It's been the most popular joke about EU overregulation: desk-bound European Commission bureaucrats sitting in Brussels with nothing better to do than regulating the shapes and sizes of fruit and vegetables.

Until now, the EU only granted space on supermarket shelves for norm-fitting vegetables or fruit, but starting July 1, strange shapes and sizes are allowed back.

Fruit stand at a market
Desk-bound Brussels bureaucrats say a plum is a plum regardless of its shape

"July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot," EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.

"It makes no sense to throw away perfectly good products, just because they are the 'wrong' size and shape," she added.

20 years of strict rules on cucumber's curvature

But for the last twenty years, the EU has been throwing away "perfectly good products," with strict regulations that divided fruit and vegetables into classes depending not only on their quality but also appearance.

The criteria included, for instance, the degree of curvature of cucumbers and the smoothness of carrots.

The idea behind the legislation was to make it easier for EU consumers to compare products, but the regulation ended up becoming the most popular jibe at EU micro-regulation and bureaucracy overkill.

Last November, the 27 EU nations gave the green light for lifting the regulation. In all, standards for 26 fruits and vegetables are being scrapped, including apricots, eggplant, cherries, garlic, melons, and spinach.

"This is a concrete example of our drive to cut unnecessary red tape. We don't need to regulate this sort of thing at the EU level," Boel said.

Standards remain for 10 products

Standards are, however, kept in place for 10 products, including some of the most popular in European kitchens: apples, citrus fruit, kiwi, lettuce, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, grapes and tomatoes.

Apple, orange, strawberry, kiwi, pear, grapes
Ten products remain under the EU regulation

Those ten account for three quarters of the value of the EU's fruit-and-vegetables trade and will still have to conform to standard shape and size and pass some visual tests before they're sent off to the supermarkets.

Nevertheless, even these ten can dodge Brussels' watchful eye if they are sold with an appropriate label, alarming the consumer about their shortcomings in terms of shape and size.

"In other words, the new rules will allow national authorities to permit the sale of all fruit and vegetables, regardless of their size and shape," the EU Commission said in a statement.

I was getting those apples for 20 bucks a 1000 lb tote in the early 90's and running them to my place in Montana where we would grind/press them and turn them into juice. I was up to a few thousand gallons a year out of the back yard until the 1996 Odwalla E. coli outbreak. Local health department came down on me like stink on schit, I had every health food store and farmers market covered for a long ways around......

My local deer loved me, when they'd hear the grinder fire up they came in droves....

If you ate talking potatoes, this is not good for Idaho. Idaho normally ships half of it's crop as fresh pack. About 10% is grown for seed and 40% is processed. Without fresh pack sales, Idaho growers will be hit hard.

The second largest potato growing is Washington. Washington processes about 87% of it's crop. French fries are the number one processed item. Most all of the potatoes processed in Washington are grown under contracts

There are no hog farms that could feed all this ahead of their less perishable feeds?

This whole thing puzzles me.

Without the bail out would these guys have scrambled like grain producers with acres and acres of 35% corn...

This is looking like another demonstration of how government intervention undermines markets innate drive to adapt and survive.

I get that these are extreme circumstances, but this is waste on a profound scale.

Dutch put me down for some of the mudbugs.

Know how to take care of that problem.

How many of you have looked into the SBA administrated CARES Act loan\grant program? It’s virtually a no doc application under $200,000K. This includes sole proprietors. The site is up and running. All you need is an EIN# and a bank account.

This kind of crap is killing the farmers here.

We’re in line, but that doesn’t help me move product. If we don’t start moving fish into people’s mouth’s PDQ, it’s going to start stinking bad around here.

But, I’m on it. Three conference calls today with customers, all trying to figure out how to get it to work. Tried to talk to a custom processor yesterday, and they are slammed with orders from various internet distributors. No time to mess with anything new. Grocery stores are getting bypassed, big time; people do not want to go grocery shopping in the PNW. EVERYBODY, his uncle and his dog is trying to make home delivery work right now. If you’re laid off, grub hub, ubereats, etc are on a massive growth spurt. Lots of drivers wanted.

Stores have a fair bit of stuff here, but ground beef and potatoes are usually gone.

Always has.

Bet the imports of agriculture goods have not slowed much though.

The 110,000,000 Americans would still be eating something, somewhere.

I'd love to see some here in our stores. I got a fresh salmon filet here today, but it was just about an orphan.

I was wondering the same thing. Seems like all that they'd have to do is repackage it for the retail market instead of the wholesale market. But then I remembered that everyone is laid off of work and pretty much broke. I know it's no more filet mignon for me for a while.

LOL...I asked for an estimate on a pound of stew meat today.

Yep, and that somewhere is somewhere other than Florida.

I would put a GPS IN OR ON MY COWS.

Everything is crazy right now.

Cattle have had the bottom drop out...

Feeder steers sold in some places for under a $1 a pound last week.

Maybe their hands were tied by crop insurance regulations.

fuggin' regulators and revenuers.

So Jim, honestly, does it work sorta like car insurance. If your damage is at a certain level they "total" your crop and tell you to plow it under?

Geno

That got my wheels turning. I'm going to look into how a long a drive it is and maybe I can make a trip with the little pick up and cargo trailer. Get friends to donate ice chests, maybe get someone to come along as co-driver.

Don't know if there's any regulations I'll get stopped for at the bug station, heck they might even be shut down.

Let me check out a few things.

Any hog farms around there you can sell some to? There's a fish back east with a common name of "hogchoker" that they used to harvest in great numbers just for that purpose.

Even if I can't get up there, I wish you the best.

Geno

Generally the crop has to be destroyed to recieve payment.

Generally you may not destroy said crop in a manner that would make you or someone else money.

Plowed under is normally how it goes.


Not sure how it works with fresh crops....but I am sure its similar.

Everything is shut down in the state, no personal travel. We’re still in ok shape for a couple of weeks, and if we have to, we’ll just turn the hot spigot off and put everything in hibernation. But there’s no money in that....

Fortunately, it looks like we found a way to get at least some product moving this week, so that’ll help. But dang, it’s like pulling teeth.....

Even if its a little bad, can't they sell it to china? Them phuggin people eat anything.

A note on the hog feeding idea,
Most pork in the US is contract fed, belonging to either the processor or a large contract grower.
The farmer is basically a contracted herdsman with little to no input on feed, feed rations, or ingredients.

Secondly, at this time corn is selling below break even and going down with the closing/shutdown of many ethanal plants. The hogs are bred and raised to exact feeding/feed factions for the absolute maximum "yields" at the slaughter house. These are not the hogs most people think about, a lot different than the hogs of 10-15-20 years ago.

Don't know how many fire members have ever been in a confinement hog building but I can tell you that if you threw green plants in front of most of the "residents" you would have sick if not dead hogs......if they even knew what to do and tried to eat them.

With the regulations for exporting pork to meet as well, contract growers would not be willing to take the chances.

It’s on my radar.

I'm buying my fresh food from the restaurant supply chain. I have a cousin who is in the restaurant business. I tell him what I want, he orders it. I bought 50# flour Saturday for $14. I bought 60# of filet mignon today for $5.69. I bought rice, beans, onions... who needs a grocery store??

You'd still need a processing plant capable of handling that amount - but once canned (ala Frank's Kraut) it can be on the shelf for a long, long time...

Good question.. My son doesn't care for it.. My wife and I love it - especially when I make ribs and sauerkraut and dumplings... Mmmm mmmmm!

Highly specialized supply chains that are not flexible enough to turn on a dime. They have been running that business like that for a long time.

We're in line and waiting, have all supporting paperwork ready.
I'm thinking the banks are a bit overwhelmed at this point.

A new honey wagon? You gonna overtake the stinky-pinky empire? 😐

His problem is more than likely he has large contacts for the beans and no secondary sales.....when I raised green and wax beans I had contracts with 2 major grocery store chains. But I had a buffer by selling at a booth in Eastern Market that was to restaurants, small stores and private individuals, it was my higher profit margin.

Also shows the downside to being a one item ag producer. Yes, in some times/markets being the best at one thing can really pay off, but not being flexible or diverse in your enterprise is not without risk.

One small, very small I admit, upside, is the benefit to those farmers soils...