(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Small, independent chicken farmers are thriving during the pandemic [1]
['Kate Cox', 'Joe Fassler', 'The Counter', 'Ac Shilton', 'Andrew Jenner', 'Jessica Fu']
Date: 2020-05-01 18:04:02+00:00
Until recently, Dave Jordan sold seven sizes of chickens to restaurants every week. After overseeing their lives from infancy through slaughter, he would drive freshly harvested birds from his Arizona ranch to metro Phoenix’s top restaurants. At a given time, he kept some 6,000 birds. They ate $3,000 in feed a week. With just one full-time employee and four part-timers, he sold 20,000 chickens per year—a recurring weekly order of 50 birds of 1.5 pounds here, an order of two dozen 4-pounders there, and so on. It took Jordan a decade to develop and massage his system. In mid-March, that system appeared to have collapsed overnight.
On March 17, Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego closed restaurants for dine-in service due to the spread of the coronavirus. Within days, nearly all of Jordan’s restaurant clients had canceled their orders.
“When it first happened, I was just in this dreamworld,” Jordan said. “Because I would come out my door, the sun rose, the chickens were all still there, the chickens were just as hungry. The days were just as long. Nothing changed.”
Jordan had hundreds of birds ready for slaughter, thousands more in earlier stages of growth. He had a $20,000 feed order en route to his ranch. And while those pieces remained in motion, the hard-won market for his birds had cooked.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://thecounter.org/small-chicken-farmers-thriving-coronavirus-shutdown-poultry-perdue-tyson-covid-19/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
