Farmers Dump Milk, Break Eggs as Coronavirus Restaurant Closings Destroy Demand

Farmers and food companies across the country are throttling back production as the virus creates chaos in the agricultural supply chain, erasing sales to restaurants, hotels and cafeterias despite grocery stores rushing to restock shelves. American producers stuck with vast quantities of food they cannot sell are dumping milk, throwing out chicken-hatching eggs and rendering pork bellies into lard instead of bacon.

In part, that is because they can’t easily shift products bound for restaurants into the appropriate sizes, packages and labels necessary for sale at supermarkets. Few in the agricultural industry expect grocery store demand to offset the restaurant market’s steep decline.

Farms are plowing under hundreds of acres of vegetables in prime U.S. growing regions like Arizona and Florida. Chicken companies are shrinking their flocks, to curb supplies that could weigh on prices for months to come.

Mississippi-based Sanderson Farms Inc., which last week said demand from its restaurant customers was down 60% to 65%, has begun breaking eggs rather than hatch them and raise the chicks for slaughter. Other poultry companies are taking similar steps, meat-industry officials said.

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