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Does the Media Care More About Avocados Than American Farmers?
Have you heard? There might be an avocado shortage? What will we put on our toast?
🚨🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Avocado prices just surged 34%, the largest jump in a decade. 🚨🚨🚨🚨 https://t.co/mMdqQPuCxh
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) April 2, 2019
Why are we facing this crisis? President Trump is considering shutting down the border and Mexican imports, But are the avocados really the most important consideration here? Brandon Darby, one of the best (if not the best) reporters covering the situation at the U.S.-Mexican border, commented on Twitter yesterday:
https://twitter.com/brandondarby/status/1112897752890073089
The Great Avocado Panic of 2019 got me thinking about another food crisis as I’ve been reading a fantastic book recommended to me by my LadyBrains podcast cohost Kelly Maher, who runs her own farm. The book, the Omnivore’s Dilemma, highlights just how dependent our country is on corn; not necessarily for the best reasons, but nevertheless, our food structure is centered on corn in an unhealthy way. With this dependence on corn in mind, I’ve thought about the devastating and mostly ignored floods happening in Nebraska and Iowa and what they have surely done to our food supply.
The damage has been extensive, and even though the area is as gritty and resilient as they come, it is inevitable that the toll to farmland and animals is extensive, and that for farmers already barely skating by, this could be devastating. The damage these floods have done won’t just affect our short-term prices of groceries, but also extend to the long-term, with farmers perhaps deciding starting over doesn’t make financial sense.
.@SenSasse and I joined @NENationalGuard to get an aerial view of flooding impact as we traveled to thank volunteers in Fremont, address a community meeting in Niobrara, and receive a briefing in Lynch. More here: https://t.co/78cd5jkTOG#NebraskaFlood | #NebraskaStrong pic.twitter.com/h32kyx0NE4
— Gov. Pete Ricketts (@GovRicketts) March 16, 2019
There has been so little coverage of the toll these floods have taken on our food supply that I had to ask for some on Twitter. I only received one solid piece in response, published by CBS News, that outlined what this could do to the rest of America’s bottom line,
Such an approach could end up hurting not only Nebraskans, but consumers all across the country. That’s because they’ll have to pay more for food, particularly meat. Prices for hogs and cattle rose Wednesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Agriculture contributes more than $25 billion to Nebraska’s economy, and the state ranks fourth in the nation in meat production. But many herds have been almost completely obliterated. And it will be impossible to get the remaining cattle and hogs to market until impassable roads and bridges are repaired. Nebraska’s Governor Pete Ricketts described the damage as the most widespread in the state’s history.
Certain losses could be covered under farm insurance policies, but they’re very specific. They may not cover grain that isn’t stored in a silo or a power outage for the refrigeration needed on a dairy farm. Many farmers have federally subsidized crop insurance. But the problem is that under these policies, they’ll have to work extremely fast to make sure their seeds are planted by a certain time, said Worters. And that could prove impossible if fields remain flooded.
Many Nebraska farmers are already at a disadvantage because they’re close to the financial breaking point. According to former North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, there are “record bankruptcies in the farming country” of the upper Midwest. These farmers are already reeling from setbacks, including a tariff war as other nations respond to higher U.S. tariffs with tariffs of their own on imported U.S. agricultural products.
It’s likely the only way Americans will only take note of the tragedy in the Midwest when they see their prices go up at their local supermarkets. One would think this level of devastation would be newsworthy, especially considering the cost that will be passed onto American consumers.
If only they grew avocados in Nebraska.
Published in Environment, Journalism
Or if only the President took an anti-Nebraska stance. Something tells me it would force the press to re-evaluate it’s indifference to this particular section of North America.
Peanut butter and jelly. It’s even better than avocados on toast. I love avocados but I can live without them a couple of weeks.
Well, as others have noted, if the Mainstream Media didn’t have double standards they would have no standards at all.
If the corn harvest is really bad, maybe we can relax the ethanol mandates that require putting 1/3 of corn into *gas* tanks of cars. Dumbest idea ever.
Gasoline prices are already rising, as the supply of corn-based ethanol drops and the long term price of ethanol points upward. All of this, of course is due to the collusion of agribusiness Republicans and #LabCoatLeft Democrats claiming gasoline use is causing global climate change.
We should take this disaster as a cue to end our government mandated dependence on turning fossil water and corn into car fuel.
From a Big Ag website:
From a supply chain news website:
I believe 19 out of 20 farmers today are superfluous hobby farmers, farming the tax code and subsidy programs while working other jobs. While my heart goes out to the people and communities effected, to cry for multimillionaires taking more than thousands of food stamp recipients from the public fisc is not so high on my priority list.
When you subtract out the hobby farmers, I wonder what this looks like. Debt, net worth, and so forth.
You know we get a lot more than avocados from Mexico and we also sell plenty of goods to them as well. Shutting down all trade to Mexico will do more economic harm than just our loss of delicious avocados. So people who think they only thing we’ll lose if Trump shuts down all legal entries to the US from Mexico are avocados are just stupid. The Cartels have plenty of ways to sneak their narcotics in and won’t simply stop just because Trump declares the border closed. All closing the border will do is disrupt legal trade while just slightly hindering narcotics and human trafficking.
If Trump did that all Trumpers would suddenly discover just how much they’ve always hated Nebraska.
The answer to your headline is, “Yes.”
But we knew that before this disaster. Just compare media coverage of anything concerning the middle of America with the media coverage of anything similar on the coasts.
I hear that border control is a real problem right now. I know, we could give them more resources! LOL
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Ever since Cedar Rapids, Iowa got killed by flood that went way into a 500 year floodplain, I always worry about this stuff. One thing that I learned from that was, floodplains are basically drawn with politics and by insurance companies more than scientists, but I’m not up on all the details
What happened to the Hipsters and their insistence on ‘Locally Grown’ produce? Think how much Global warming fossil fuels are used shipping avocados from Mexico to cities in North America.
Another anecdote on the cluelessness of the media about what is important to the economy.
Several years ago there was a major legal dispute about the scope of patent coverage on genetically engineered corn. When the dispute got to the U.S. Supreme Court, the “oh-so-smart” pundits complained about taking up precious Court time with a “trivial” dispute about corn, instead of “important” stuff.
In making that complaint, these “oh-so-smart” pundits revealed how ignorant they were about the magnitude of agricultural products, and corn in particular, to the U.S. economy.
Flood plains are primarily drawn by water.
Most farmers are hobby farmers, but most farming is not done by hobby farmers. It’s another example of the power distribution (80% of the work is done by 20% of the people is the usual formulation, but that particular division isn’t always the case). The places getting hit in Nebraska will be either large working farms or smaller family farms that are part of a conglomeration.
The large farms are run so efficiently that they don’t have a whole lot of slack to absorb the massive hit. That’s what the crop insurance is for -but as noted, the crop insurance only covers certain things. The smaller farms are part of a conglomeration -they don’t exactly revenue share, but the conglomerate does help keep prices down and provide insurance for crop failures et cetera. But again, the hit is sufficiently bad it will probably swamp those insurance and seed arrangements.
Regardless, floods of this magnitude are sufficiently rare that we don’t normally plan for them (it doesn’t make financial sense to insure against such low probability events), and that’s why its so bad when they do hit. They swamp everyone at once.
So get avocados from Brazil, west Africa, the Philippines. It’s not like they are a rare commodity. I used to buy 5 avocados for less than $1 when I lived in west Africa. And while we’re at it get some cashew juice from Brazil.
Right, and the way insurance works with respect to this is extremely messed up.
Maybe. But I think this is where people who loathe the President would be projecting their passions onto those who don’t. (I voted for him – plus I go out of my way to call him “the President” – but I’m not sure if I qualify as a Trumper). I think they’d be amused by the result: some Americans would begin to care about the Midwest nearly as much as they do about Mexico.
A border shutdown will impact Texas and Arizona in more than just a lack of Avocados and a Gauc shortage.
Mexican tourists that visit and shop in Pima County (Tucson) bring in about 1 billion dollars per year to the local economy. This includes sales tax revenue.
One other thing about the wealth of farmers. Many of those guys are very wealthy party because they bought land right before central banks started easing for years and years. Post-World War II for about seven years, and LBJ wanting guns and butter which created all of that inflation in 70s comes to mind. I’ve seen charts of the last 20 years and it has gone to the moon, because they have been just way too easy since 1996. That literally comes out of the poor and middle-class. And then people wonder why socialism and populism is breaking out everywhere.
Just to be clear there has been some incredible technological progress as well, but that isn’t what’s unfair about all this. I think that nitrogen fertilizer only really got going in the late 50s.
I’m going to start my new career as an avocado smuggler. Who’s in with me? I need a Spanish speaker . . . (or as Obama would say, someone who speaks “Mexican”)
Especially if you need to get them from Mexican countries like Guatemala. But I’m down with helping you distribute in Chicago. I think being an Avocado smuggler will be fun. We can run underground avocado toast bars… it will be great.
We need to come up with fun gangster names for ourselves.
Only six to eight percent of any of the immigrants coming here from Mexico have ever set foot inside an American ag landscape. Period.
They do not need to pick food here in California, as all they need to do to get benefits the rest of us can only envy is show up at any County’s Social service building, fill out some forms, state that they are penniless, and no ID is even required.
These benefits include housing vouchers, often worth more than $ 1,000, AFDC checks, food stamps and medical insurance. Oh and California has waived the out of state tuition fees, so there is that as well.
The Straw Man Brigade? (If you decide to smuggle in straws as well.)
A billion in one county? Hard to believe . . .
Even if it were true, I’d rather the country do without their revenue than the billions of benefits illegals suck from our economy, not to mention the crimes some of them commit . . .
I also seem to recall that this is the time of year when avocados are not really in season. The price goes up quite a bit this time of year, just due to Mother Nature.
Man, I have put one of those new wax covered paper straws into my mouth, and it was disgusting. For normal plastic straws I will do more than smuggle. I propose setting up guerrilla groups wagging a VC style insurgency.
PS: I know, I know wax covered paper straws are actually old not new, they were the first straws. If we don’t count hollow reeds. But the past sucks, everything that is old is bad and should be changed out for something new, shiny, and made of chrome colored plastic. Plastics it’s the future baby!
My understanding is that the new straws that replace the old plastic ones are actually designed to utilize all the wheat that no one in the USA knows what to do with. This is because of how RoundUp afflicts the soil, and how our wheat crops are so over-sprayed with it, so our soils now manufacture a lot of vomitoxin, fusarium and other fungal nasties. As a result, many other governments across the globe have banned wheat. So when you shop, you see lots of ice cream that is about “cookies and cream” or “shortcake.” This gyps the customer, who is paying top dollar for items that should have dairy in them but now are one third by volume our over abundant wheat.
So if your experience is that the new “wax” straws aren’t as good as the old wax straws, you are probably right.