Category: Current Events

Farmers and agricultural publications continue to provide detail that shows the seriousness our politicians aren’t yet really facing.

Menker’s team at Gro Intelligence finds, as of May 19, global inventories of wheat amount to 20% of annual consumption, meaning the world has just 10 weeks’ worth of global wheat consumption in storage.

“Conditions today are worse than those experienced in 2007 and 2008,” she says. “The lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring, while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years.”

AgWeb, Is the World Really Running Out of Wheat? 06/07/2022

Note that AgWeb doesn’t answer the question that they ask. The answer appears to be, “Yes, we are running out of wheat.”

More specifically, the world would probably be okay if we were getting bumper crops in the US and Canada, but we’re not. We’re lucky in that the over-wet weather finally broke long enough for us to get wheat, corn, and soybeans planted, but we’re not going to get a crop that will compensate for the lack of wheat elsewhere.

Also worth noting: The price of beef is not looking too expensive right now relative to expectations. Unfortunately, that appears to be because beef farmers are afraid that the cost of fodder and grains will go high enough that they won’t be able to keep their cattle profitably, so it’s better to slaughter and sell them in the short term than raise them longer term. That keeps a lid on prices right now — higher supply — but reduces supply in the future dramatically, because we’re killing tomorrow’s stock today.

I reiterate that I’m not an expert on this stuff and am only repeating what I hear from people in the business who seem to know better. Feel free to argue: I’d love to find out that I’m wrong.

McCormick says the demand [for wheat] sits around 1-1.2 billion metric tonnes and where the numbers sit now as far as potential available product, is somewhere around 700 million, which will no doubt have the potential to drive food prices even higher than what is being experienced right now.

RealAgriculture.com

If you want to put a number on the crisis we’re facing, here’s one estimate.

I feel like I have to say this, because otherwise people will take this post the wrong way: I believe that food cost and availability is going to be much more of a problem than it currently is, particularly outside of North America.

Okay, then. Now, someone I respect recently posted this article as an example of the ongoing war on food.

100-year-old Prosser grain silo destroyed in dramatic fireball

But a grain elevator explosion isn’t new or surprising. Fine dust from organic materials is always an explosion hazard. According to the Kansas State University, there were sixteen agricultural dust explosions in 1997, and a ten-year average prior to that of thirteen agricultural dust explosions per year. Of the sixteen in 1997, nine occurred in grain elevators.

So the raw fact of a single explosion needs to be put into context.

Are we seeing double the number of grain explosions? Triple? 100 times? Or, perhaps, half the usual number? One tenth?

And how much of our food supply chain does this affect? 1%? 10%? 0.001%?

My source shared this explosion because he sees that there are a large number of fires in our food supply chain. He’s not the only one. Here’s an article that points to a variety of fires that have hit food processing plants.

Fires at Food Processing Plants Result in Reduced Capacity, Delays, and Layoffs

The headline talks about “fires” (plural) resulting in reduced capacity (a general quantity), which makes it sound like the totality of the fires will cause a general reduction in capacity. And it must be a newsworthy reduction, or why would it be in the news?

But in fact when you look at the article, there’s literally no sign of significant capacity problems beyond the single-plant level, and even the single-plant capacity problems are relatively few. Here, for instance:

Oregon-based Shearer’s Foods laid off its entire workforce—about 230 people—after a fire ripped through the Hermiston plant in late February.

“After assessing the damage, it’s clear that the destruction is too great to rebuild and begin production in the near term,” Shearer’s Foods CEO Bill Nictakis said in a March 8 statement.

Damn, sounds bad, right? But wait:

“Unfortunately, it would take at least 15 [to] 18 months before we could resume production,” Nictakis said. “We have not yet decided [on] the future of the Shearer’s Hermiston site. [It] has led to the very difficult decision to end employment for our team members.”

There’s more than one plant?

He said the company was “exploring opportunities to relocate team members interested in working in our other plants.”

Yes. And the others are still operational, which means Shearer didn’t lay off its “entire workforce”, but only the workforce related to that plant.

What about the four-alarm fire at Taylor Farms?

“This was an unfortunate event, but thankfully there were no injuries. We have a strategic network across North America where this will not impact the availability of fresh foods from Taylor Farms,” Rachel Molatore, the company’s director of communications, told The Epoch Times. “No employees were laid off; we are already underway to rebuild the facility, and the investigation is still going on regarding the cause of the fire.”

And so on.

On April 30, a soybean processing tank caught fire at a Purdue Farms plant in Chesapeake, Virginia. However, company officials said the facility would continue operating.

Even the poignant and sad event that leads the article, a fire at Wisconsin River Meats, shows how devastating such an event can be for…20 people.

Company owner David Mauer said the Mauston-based company “lost everything” related to production in the fire, and more than 20 people lost their jobs.

I have immense sympathy for everyone involved, but a 20-person company is a single sodium ion in the ocean of the US food supply chain. This is not a significant event — and the others mentioned appear to be even less so.

I haven’t even begun to try to do the full amount of research needed to quantify the impact of fires at food processing plants in an ordinary year, but it’s pretty clear from a quick overview that it’s pretty close to zero. But the people sharing stories like this seem to have even less of a baseline to work from, and they’re brought up short when confronted with the fact that the collection of fires they’re looking at represents a negligible fraction of our food supply chain.

I think we should be watching out for potential evil around us. We need to be wary for the things that are going to kill us, because I do believe we’re in the middle of a war. But we have to beware of seeing snipers in every tree. Focusing on what’s important means ignoring the unimportant, and these fires are unimportant.