Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/covid-19-2/)
“He took actions that cost U.S. farmers a lot of money, and potentially have a lot of long-term downsides,” said Joseph Glauber, a former USDA Chief Economist and senior research fellow at the International Food Research Center. “But you can have as bad of policy as you want, if you can silence the critics by giving them a bunch of money.”
Even as thousands of their employees fell ill with COVID-19, meatpacking executives pressured federal regulators to help keep their plants open, according to a trove of emails obtained by USA TODAY and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened some farmers' stress. A few shared how they're managing it.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, more Americans — and particularly Americans of color — have experienced limited or uncertain access to adequate food.
Maria Romero’s mother is among at least 4,627 Arkansas poultry workers to have been infected by COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. More than half of them, like Romero’s mother, are Hispanic.
About 1 percent of all PPP loans went to agribusinesses.
Because in some instances only aggregate data has been released, only about half of meatpacking plants with outbreaks have been publicly identified.
While nursing homes and prisons made up most rural hot spots in the spring, growing evidence now points to a different major “engine of spread” that has lurked beneath the radar of public awareness and official recognition: meat-processing.
Smithfield’s ad, which was published the Washington Post Omaha World-Herald, and New York Times, begins with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Not all farms are struggling equally during the pandemic. Retail market farms, who sell directly to the consumer, are actually doing pretty well.