Over the years I have purchased beef in bulk. It has been a long while and with all of the news, I have reached out to some local shops and farms. This is one of the responses that I received. All of this is starting to get a bit concerning.
Okay, so things have really been crazy in the meat industry in the past 6 weeks. We have booked more livestock than we ever have in this amount of time, so we have had to stop taking orders. If you would like to put your name on a list for ordering we will take your name and number if you call our slaughter houses. We are booked to about September (maybe longer now).
Weber S-335 gas grill
Weber 26†kettle
Weber 22†kettle
Camp Chef XL Smoke Vault
Camp Chef 3 Burner cook top
Camp Chef Woodwind 36 Pellet grill with sidekick burner
PBC
Accessories:
SnS XL
SnS standard
Vortex
Weber Rotisserie for 22†Kettle
1st gen FireBoard
2nd gen FireBoard
Griddle for Camp Chef cooktop
Several Thermoworks items
Set of Grill Grates
All of our local small butchers are booked around here through the end of August as a minimum. You can buy all the animals you want right now but nobody to butcher them. Hogs aren't too hard at all to butcher but beef just do to the size can be a problem for people.
Same here in Southern Indiana. As mentioned there are plenty of animals for sale (often at a nice rate) but local butcher shops are at capacity for what they can process. Also seems to be a run on deep freezers right now. Our 1/4 beef is pushed till September and not sure about the hog yet...
The local meat locker and processor I normally shop at is shut down to the public for 3 days this week just to try to get caught up in processing and restocking as they have been hit so bad with panic buyers.
Yes some of these plants are shutdown but the downtime is going to be days not months. In the meantime the media and John q never prepared public think there may never be another pound of bacon available again.
One of the biggest problems with all the shortages right now has been our evolution away from warehousing in favor of just in time inventory. A local Toyota plant wanted to reopen already but because some of their required parts come from Illinois (who isn’t in the same time table as Indiana) they can’t reopen yet.
Yup, "There’s trouble comin everyday". Troutman uttered almost your exact words about the "disconcerting" about a month ago when a packing plant or something shut down. I said then & say now, the tsunami is comin.
There's reports of milk dumping and slaughtered hogs being dumped because they no market for them.
Sorta flies in the face of meat shortages we hear of.
We can only blame the media for so much but they do seem to be the chief rumor mongers.
Toyota plant in Woodstock re-opened yesterday here too, haven't heard if they're actually producing cars or not.
You can thank the industrialized CAFO and cheap prices and USDA for building an unsustainable process. I have been buying local grass fed and pastured protein for 6 or so years. My farmers business is based on sustainability regenerative soil practices and his sales have skyrocketed in the past 2 years even though way more expensive. Perhaps people are learning.
They won't. People have been conditioned that government regulations will ensure safe food, which it doesn't. And they rely on the ease of getting anything they want anytime they want at a big box store, rather than eating seasonally or stocking up for a year. They'll cry and whine for the system to be fixed.
OK we can all agree that Covid-19 was bad, maybe the worst thing to happen to this country since WW II and the Great Depression combined. Now there's the new Killer Hornet (please don't run out for two of the big 50 packs of TP). But a meat SHORTAGE ??? I'm loading up my twelve and twenty gauges and headin' out !! It may be cats or rats but I'm bagging me somethin'. Hear this and hear this good, here in Texas you stand between a man and his meat and it's hanging time !!
(or was that a man and his horse....ahhh you all know what I mean )
That hornet is like 2†long and lives in subterranean nests. Attributed to 50 deaths a year in Japan. But it’s only been reported up in Vancouver and upper state Washington and they think they got a handle on it. Giant hornets, fire ants and killer bees...oh my!
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