This last day of winter brings much to the rural countryside.
Calls of flocked geese and sandhill cranes are echoing their way through the otherwise silent sky; the first green is being pulled from the winter-browned grasses; planting equipment is being checked; new calves are finding their ways around pastures and barnyards. And yes, that coronavirus thing has the full attention of folks urban and rural.
We head into another spring filled with many questions — in some ways more than even last year, when snow and then wetness persisted well toward summer. Perhaps one of the biggest questions this year has to do with what the coronavirus issue has exposed in our food-supply chains.
Hoarders have been hitting grocery-store shelves hard since social-distancing suggestions and mandates started appearing. The unexplained need for people to purchase as much toilet paper as they’ve purchased in recent days is well-documented with a mix of seriousness and humor. Less attention has been given to the hoarding of milk, eggs and meat that have left shelves empty.
A western Wisconsin Kwik Trip store manager pointed out this morning that, even with limiting eggs to two dozen per customer per visit, hoarders were finding ways to each purchase several dozen eggs — some using several family members as individual customers. That sort of thing might be expected to happen in times such as these, but it still doesn’t totally answer why many stores’ shelves aren’t quickly re-stocked with products known to be plentiful.
Empty milk, meat and egg shelves are difficult to see in times when production of those commodities are running with grand surpluses.
We’ve been mentioning during recent days about how good ingenuity will solve many things as we continue with those social-distancing matters. It also appears that the social-distancing and its accompanying hoarding effects might raise important questions that should be answered for the betterment of all — starting with identifying weak supply-chain links that are breaking under this pressure.
The challenge will continue in correcting and strengthening those weak links as they’re identified.
Who can argue farmers’ beliefs that there never should be empty food-shelves in this country? That’s especially the case when prices those farmers receive continuously are low because we’re told more is being produced than the markets require.
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