“Not just a few either. We are talking thousands and thousands of pigs.”
He is not alone.
The closure of several Midwest pork-processing plants is forcing hog farmers to make the same tough decision in the days ahead.
Kluver usually would send his hogs to the Smithfield Foods plant in South Dakota but that plant closed when its workers contracted COVID 19. Not long after that the JBS plant in Worthington also shut down, leaving farmers with nowhere to process the market-ready pigs.
On Thursday, Kluver will have to euthanize his animals, but he may not have the strength to watch.
“I can’t do it. I just cannot," he said with emotions surfacing in his voice. “I don’t want to be part of that.”
Still, he knows the drill. Kluver described the plan for destroying his own product in excruciating detail.
“We will put them up next to the barn and shoot them. And they will load them on a truck and take them to the landfill,” he said. “If that isn’t possible, we will ground them up and hauled out into a field and incorporated into the dirt. It’s pretty gross.”
He has been through tough times before, but never anything as bad as this.
“We’ve had health issues before, like the bird flu, but in this case, these are healthy animals, and they have to be euthanized because there is no place for them.”
He believes there has to be a contingency plan in place in the event the other plants close. “If that plant gets shut down in Austin, we have some idea about when it might re-open.”
The federal government has launched a program to redistribute excess farm products, setting aside $3 billion for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to purchase it and ship it to Americans struggling to put food on the table. But many fear it's too little, too late, with thousands of pounds of food already destroyed and farmers struggling to survive with a product desperately needed but tough to distribute.
The situation Kluver faces is one of the most painful paradoxes of coronavirus. With millions of people out of work, there are fears about kids and families going hungry across the country. But with meat packing plants shutting down over employee infections and restaurants and bars shuttered, meat, dairy and produce farmers have an overwhelming surplus of raw product.
At the same time, demand at food banks has increased an average of 70%, according to Feeding America, which represents about 200 major food banks across the country. The group estimates that 40 percent of those being served are new to the system as American unemployment surges.
Kulver hopes that both the federal and state governments step in to help, otherwise he fears that many of the small family farms in Minnesota may become extinct.
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