Farmers' nightmare
Reading about egg producers stuck with their production, unable to predict demand, brings me back to my childhood Sundays in the summer picking corn at my grandmother's. I think I've mentioned before my grandmother's foresight at insisting one of my grandfather's lands be converted to a farm for her, just before WW2, and how they fed the ancestral village. Part of it was for cattle, the barn was for other livestock, and then there was glorious vegetables for miles. There was a Weeping Willow by the stream that used to be the river named after my ancestor (albeit deformed to Vivry by the English). My mother loved getting her vegetables from the farm and she adored her sister-in-law who partly ran the farm/ranch, so she'd send us out to help pick crops. I recall I hated tomatoes then but still, we picked corn, tomatoes, turnip, green beans I think, bell peppers, etc. Those were the days. Now, I'd love to have my bio farm. Getting back to Covid-impacted farmers with surpluses, I shudder at the waste and wonder if taking on the next steps of transformation wouldn't be a good idea? You've got eggs? Rather than be wasted, what if they were dehydrated, powderized and packaged for export to developing countries? What if the whites and yokes were separated and put in cartons? Production would go a longer way, right? Same for vegetables or milk: dehydrate, powderize and package. It can go towards powder broths and other things. These are just suggestions. Putting our heads together and reaching across to help the other, I've witnessed, is the farmers' way.