The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is starting to be felt by farmers across the country, including here in northern Michigan.
Isabella County dairy farmer Abe Pasch says the dairy industry is starting to feel the pinch from the coronavirus. He says demand for milk is down and people’s buying patterns have changed. There’s also questions about what will happen if processing plants are forced to close or scale back.
“The challenge of it is that the processing is limited, we can’t limit the amount of milk our girls produce, there’s no on off button. Milk future prices predicted for the rest of 2020 have dropped off dramatically. We’re concerned about prices dropping below our cost of production price if we move through May and into the end of the year,” said Pasch.
Fruit farmers in Leelanau County are also working around challenges as they prepare for the start of their growing season.
“We had some people come in from out of state so we quarantined them for about 14 days and we’ll hopefully get them back to work, but we’re a little bit short of workers right now. We don’t know whether schools are going to be ordering product or not ordering product,” said Jim Bardenhagen owner of Bardenhagen Farms.
Farmers say with so much still up in the air, they’re focused on controlling what they can in the next several months.
“I think there’s an uptick in people consuming milk at home just because they have more time to make a bowl of cereal in the morning. We’ll we try and use risk management tools to shore up pricing but like many other industries this is a first for us, it’s unprecedented and we’re just trying to navigate things the best we can,” said Pasch.
Congressman Jack Bergman from northern Michigan signed a letter sent to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture this week, urging him to make sure farmers impacted by the coronavirus see relief included in the CARES Act.
The act included $9.5 billion for those in the agriculture industry impacted by the virus.
It also includes $14 billion to replenish the Commodity Credit Corporation.
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