Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles I'm putting food on the table is certainly a growing concern for Americans who have lost their jobs. Were lost wages because of the Corona virus. Economic shutdown. Those difficult images of cars lined up for miles at food banks and cities across the nation tell the story. Some food banks say that they've actually struggled. They continue to struggle to keep up with the demand that those images air hard to reconcile with the ones that were also seeing from dairy farmers being forced to dump excess milk because restaurants and schools that would usually buy it or shut down. Now some produce farmers air burying their harvested crops. It also would have been ordered by schools in a restaurant. So one of the farmers struggling with this shutdown joins us. Now Sean Meyers is the CEO of a why he produce on the Oregon Idaho border. He's had to dispose of the surplus onions that he grows on his farm. Shay, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me it. When did your farm first start to feel the impact of restaurants and schools which are usually some of your biggest customers shutting down you know, a big part of our customer base is in the New York area, so soon as New York start started having its challenges, we started feeling the impact here. Um, but the initial results were not reductions in shipments. Rather's. It was increases because everyone is going out to buy more at the grocery store and you have to dispose of £4 million of onions. And where does it all go into some former struggle to even find somewhere to put those leftover products? Yeah, there's always some surplus, but not to the level that we're talking about now. And so what we've done is we're going into composting pits and back onto fields, this fertilizer. But it's very expensive fertilizer. As you might imagine, I would imagine that. But at the same time, we see these nearly endless lines at food banks. So why not just make a deal with them somehow to get your products to them instead of throwing them away? Certainly. So it's a matter of timing. There's a couple of reasons for that, but the 1st 1 is we're just barely starting to feel the demand. The need for that at the food banks. Up to now, we have seen such a reduction in demand from food service and retail that we haven't had anywhere to go with the product so those deals can be made. But there's one other piece to the puzzle, and that's the fact that we're already losing right. We've already grown this crop. It's not packed it yet, and there's a cost and packaging it. So when you get nothing, you're actually not only are you donating the prophet are the product at zero, you're actually incurring another $3 per unit loss. If you if you make that donation without any support well, dairy farmers, for example, they've asked for the USDA to buy their extra milk and produce farmers asked for anything similar. What could the government do at this point right now that you would say that is helpful, Yeah, So the support that we really could have is buying Domestically, we have enough onions in the United States to something entire country easily. But what we're struggling with right now is with the currency different differentiation between the United States and Mexico. That strong dollar is meaning that Mexico wants to push Maur of their product to the United States. And so that is probably the quickest, easiest thing to do from an economic standpoint, too, at least temporarily prevent some of the product from crossing over from Mexico. Shea Myers. We so appreciate your time. Thank you. Hi, everyone. George Stephanopoulos Here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more video show highlights and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to download the ABC News after breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.
B1 ABCNews mexico product dispose fertilizer demand Farmers throw out milk, produce as schools, restaurants remain shut down 6 2 林宜悉 posted on 2020/04/15 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary