(Engine vibrating) (soft upbeat music) - We've created a system that's super efficient and we take every measure we can to cut costs.

And what that means is is that if there's a small disruption, it can have a ripple effect through the whole system, the whole supply and where we are now, isn't a small disruption.

This is an extremely large disruption to that system.

- This pandemic made us realize one thing, we live in land of plenty but there's a food chain that is just as important to us as our military is.

- It wasn't easy at first 'cause no one really knew what this virus is all about.

- There was a point where everybody was in a lot of uncertainty what was going to happen?

The stores started buying a lot of fruit but then when the schools went out we knew we were going to miss that market.

- 30% of the national supply of dairy products goes to food service.

You've gotta harvest every day and you gotta do something with it.

- We weren't gonna see it coming.

We've thought that this COVID-19 would really just put a stop to everything.

- Just to see it literally going down the drain is, it's devastating.

- It's like asking these processing facilities who are making four trucks tomorrow to retool to make Prius's.

This is a problem.

- You know that you know better than a bunch of government bureaucrats.

So thank you- (people chanting and screaming) - we can't let it take it over our lives.

- Why would a tomato, a guy that's grown row crops his whole life tomatoes and asparagus and alfalfa and cotton rice or whatever he's doing.

Why would he want wake up one day, get rid of three generations of equipment that made him successful.

Turnaround start farming almonds.

Anybody ever ask that question.

- During the COVID-19 issues and problems that everybody had, they wouldn't have been able to eat.

I know there were times of stores when there was no toilet paper, you see no eggs, you would see no produce on the stands and we continue to work.

And the people that worked for us continued to work, stayed on the job to help feed America (light upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production funding for American grown.

My job depends on Ag provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges electric, proudly serving the central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(light upbeat music) ♪ I came to tell you ♪ ♪ Tonight, ♪ ♪ That I lied high ♪ ♪ I shut down ♪ ♪ I let your flowers die ♪ ♪ I let them die.

♪ - So in this situation, it was an abrupt stop to in many cases, half of the supply, having nowhere to go.

We've shut down restaurants, we've shut down schools.

We've shut down so much of the food service side of things where a lot of his product is destined to go that now it doesn't have a home.

And that's created some situations where we've had to dump certain items or disc under a plow under existing fields.

And it makes it extremely difficult for a farmer to make an informed decision about what's gonna happen six months from now.

There's a lot of risk in what we do financially and otherwise, but, so, if you've got, we'll take a farmer, for example who planted a thousand acres of, whatever, lettuce and has had to disk under half of it because of this situation.

And now he's got that financial investment that he may or may not owe money to a bank for that he didn't get it back.

And now he's gotta make a planning decision that may be 120 to 180 days out from now.

And this, the type of uncertainty that comes with that is almost impossible to predict at this point.

(soft upbeat music) ♪ But I am here, here, here ♪ ♪ Now I agree your sympathy ♪ ♪ Should be a shadow as my world ♪ ♪ And I can see how you're in the beat ♪ ♪ More that I ♪ (soft upbeat music) - Try to make an analogy like this.

We have two kinds of, way we eat in America.

We have, you eat at home or you eat out and over a long period of time, Americans no longer really suffer at home like we used to.

We've gone out to eat.

And so agriculture adapted over time to accommodate Americans and the world for that matter.

Civilized nations, a lot of people eat out.

We're fast-paced societies with the (indistinct).

But will the log jam and these issues with animal right now is you have a whole industry geared to providing products to your hotels and your casinos and restaurant industry in bulk size products.

You don't go into your average grocery store and find 50 pounds of bacon.

They don't even have the shelf accommodations and the refrigeration size for somebody to go buy 50 pounds of bacon.

You don't see 25 pounds of butter.

These are the problems.

- There's kind of a domino effect that happens when any sort of major disruption like this happens.

So for example, someone who is raising animals needs someone to farm the feed for those animals.

And now, again, if I go back to the planning decisions as these people, how many animals are gonna be in that supply chain six months from now, and what should we plant today to make sure that there's enough feed.

It really starts to get a little fuzzy about how and why and what anybody should do.

(upbeat music) ♪ You be ♪ ♪ I hope you understand ♪ So pre COVID We did stop picking lemons 'cause the inventories were getting too large and the fruit wasn't moving out.

Then once the COVID hit lemons and the other citrus commodities really took off and demand increased.

(upbeat music) We opened in 2001 and we started as just a cold storage built a packing house, got into the citrus and the stone fruit.

And I've been in business since.

So as we tried to stay open, there were lots of times that we didn't get all the updated information that we needed as soon as we thought we needed to get it.

So it was kind of a scramble every day to make sure that we were, if we would get a positive find we would talk to, try to call people and figure things out.

We weren't getting, the state of California wasn't giving us any information besides saying we are an essential business that needed to stay open, we did not get a lot of information directly from the state that helped us stay open to feed America.

(upbeat music) - I didn't wanna lose my people.

I did not wanna lose my workforce because when you lose your workforce, whoever you do have left they've got twice as hard.

And I just don't like to lose anybody for whatever reason.

And the thing with this COVID-19, it brought fear into people.

Some people didn't wanna even come to work, knowing that the possibility was there to be infected by this virus.

- It's right here, the ladies for the packing tables out here the fruits been dropped to them sized with a sticker.

So they know what size a pack style goes into the size of the tray.

So we're trying to keep extra precaution with the ladies trying to keep them separated.

Then they've, once they get a pack, they put it onto the conveyor belt here.

(machines vibrating) The full box line goes in and then comes around over here to our quality control area where the ladies are weighing the boxes, checking for imperfections.

We're also taking brick sugars, taking samples of pressures.

And then from there, the boxes would come around go over here to the palletizing station where a palletizer would stock by size.

And then after that, the boxes would get strapped in corner boarded.

We put our G-10 stickers on there and our palatine.

So once a forklift drivers bring it up the line the fruit comes over here where they get the G-10 stickers put on the side of the box.

Does the Knicks, the growers information the day, lot number.

(upbeat music) So pre COVID, the citrus markets were down there wasn't a lot of demand for the citrus items which includes the lemons enables even the mandarins had slowed down in sales.

And once COVID hit, we were very high demand where we had to hire more employees, get more pick crew picked out of the field and spend more hours at the packing house to get things done.

- If you look at the news daily, all you hear is bad news.

And that's one thing I do not like to hear is people putting fear into my workers.

I just tell them it's on God's hands.

God's in control, we're not.

(dog barking) (door clicking) (engine starting) (car revving) (dog barking) - Why not, if you've got a log jam of animals Why can't you just put them back out in a field and hope that you wait for things to change?

- Well, the big, the reason why you can't just put them back in the field is because of the log jam and excess.

The prices, they're worthless now because there's, it's just kinda like the oil industry.

Then the price went negative.

Price went negative virtually because there's no more capacity to put.

All the tanks were filled, so if you're holding on to a product it's becomes almost worthless 'cause there's no, virtually, no need for it.

So now you're gonna have to spend money to feed an animal that you're otherwise you can't afford anymore.

And sometimes size is a problem.

The animals are, you know, harvested at certain sizes and you can't just keep getting bigger and bigger.

You know, the whole process is very interesting.

We've got very efficient at what we do and how we do it but something like COVID is kinda the unintended consequences of, and it's not a bad thing.

We all eat out and everything, but there's this two sides of agriculture that I don't know if people really expected the wholesale issue with animals to be effected like this.

I certainly didn't.

- People ask, well, why can't we, you know, take that food and, and supply it and give it to food banks?

Well, the farmer has a choice of either cutting his loss and discing it under.

You know, if you're going to donate it to a food bank, who's going to pay the farmer to harvest it to package it to, you know, then you talk about the logistics of transportation from the farm, trucking ,packing costs and all these things.

So it was cheaper for the farmer to cut his loss and actually, you know, put a disc in the field and disc it under.

We saw the same thing in the dairy industry.

People weren't buying dairy products.

They were more interested in buying sanitizer and toilet paper.

And so what happened was the dairy farmer also had, you can't store it.

So they were, you know, dumping millions of gallons of milk.

You know, every day.

Some of my family owns a restaurant, locally.

If, they apply for the paycheck protection program, they can get money from the federal government to keep their employees income, right?

They can write them paychecks while the state of California and our County is telling them that they can't open the doors to their establishment, but within the next eight to 10 weeks, somehow they have to figure out how to reemploy these people, but they can't open the doors to their business.

So you've got the federal government incentivizing keeping people employed, but then you've got the state and local government here not allowing you to get your business back up and running.

And on top of that, some of the employees are actually making more money on unemployment.

Therefore, there is a disincentive for them to even wanna go back to work.

(upbeat music) - You know, you can give us whatever title you wanna give us, which is fine.

I mean, we are essential, whether there's a virus going on or not, we are essential.

And that goes for every everyone related in this industry, the Ag industry.

Like I said, we feed the world.

Again, we're not heroes.

Okay?

We're not heroes.

I don't ever wanna hear that we're heroes 'cause we're not.

We're doing a job that we wanna do.

I've been doing this for over 30 years.

I love my job or else I wouldn't be coming to work every day.

We put in long hours and every day something different because when I stepped foot into this facility, I don't know what time I'm going home.

I just don't.

'Cause anything could happen.

I could be here 12, 14, 15, 20 hours or it could be in five hours.

I don't know.

But I'll tell you what, when it's all said and done I know that what we're providing is a great product for people to eat and not just us, but everyone else.

- The problem what's what's gonna happen is the animals that need to be harvested now and that aren't, and they're gonna be euthanized and it's horrible is if we go a month from now and we slowly get back to normal there's gonna be a huge gap.

Now prices are gonna be, I mean there's gonna be a short, there's even another shortage looming.

You got a shortage of not being able to process because you have too many animals to process at retail facilities.

Now, if the wholesale stuff comes back and the demand comes back, now you have no animals for the wholesale or the retail side of things.

And that's the worry thing.

And I'm glad that Trump made a smart decision is to, you know, make these companies stay open so we can try not to make the best use and figure out what to do with these animals.

(chicken crowing) (light upbeat music) (cows mowing) - So here's the branch where we are currently picking the yellow peaches and we will get out here and see some of the fruit being picked.

So since the reopening and stores starting to really get back to more normal, I guess, per say business, they still haven't been a very consistent.

It's week to week.

Guys don't wanna run ads.

They're having a difficult time, just keeping a demand, keeping track of demand and how things have been going.

(upbeat music) (truck revving) - Is it necessary to completely shut it down?

Or if you leave it in the hands of local people they might make a different decision that says, hey, guys we need you to try and do things differently but keep your business open and keep the economy running in a way that still protects people but it doesn't just completely shut off the valve, the economic valve that all rely on.

(uplifting upbeat music) - It's kinda like the great depression era.

I'll use this as an example, my grandparents, when I got older, I kinda thought, well, why are you guys canning food?

Why are you guys always, you own a garden for?

You know, when I was a kid.

And it but my grandma and grandpa, they were serious about it.

And they were serious garden growers.

And boy, my grandpa boy, he had a lot of pride about showing his pantry full of canned food because the great depression changed them for life.

And they always thought that they were responsible for their own selves and their families.

And so they stored up and millions of American used to do that, canning.

And that would get them through the winter time or get during time of something like this.

But we don't do that.

And so maybe something like this encourages us to be so much not relying on what someone else could do for you, but more like what you can do for yourself on your own planning.

(upbeat music) - Now that we're all, not just the people that are working here, but the people, when, you know, say for instance, when you go shopping, we're all starting to get used to wearing our mask.

You go to a store and it says, you need to enter with your mask where you can enter.

I see it's not an issue anymore as it was at the beginning.

'Cause a lot of people don't want to be told what to do especially when they're on their own time.

And I think for the next time we have a wave of a bad virus, I think people can be more adjustive.

They're gonna be more prepared.

They're gonna be, they're not gonna have as much fear in them and they'll be able to overcome it.

Now this virus, we could all get it someday.

We don't know.

We don't know.

But we can't let it take over our lives.

And that's what we have to keep from happening.

Is it taking over our lives?

I know a lot of people were stuck at home because of their jobs and I feel sorry for those people and, you know, God take care of them, but in this Ag industry, we have to feed not just this country, but the World.

(upbeat music) - You know, continuing on where we are, you know, with COVID now looking at a second wave, farmers looking onto the next planting season are gonna make decisions you know, based upon where we are in the marketplace in pricing, supply, and demand and they're gonna change their, if they're able to, they're gonna change their cropping patterns that will result in different crops that we can grow, that we may not grow.

There may be a lack of food because farmers are not willing to make that investment to grow certain high cash crops that would not be profitable and that are perishable that we won't see, you know, show up in months to come in in our supermarkets.

(upbeat music) - I hope it is worth it.

I hope that since this situation is here, this is reality, whether you agree with it or disagree with it is irrelevant.

But I hope it was worth it in the respect that people take a second look at what we've taken for granted for so long and actually take the time and the energy to change it for the better.

So we don't have to do this again.

That will make it worth it in my eyes.

(light upbeat music) - You know, I think at the core, I think we've just become such an affluent country and we've never had to worry, especially our generation ,of anything remotely like this.

And so it set us back.

I think there's gonna be some long term changes that are gonna come down and it may be that Americans really think about cooking at home and not running out and eating at restaurants.

And that, it's gonna harm, may cause some terrible harm to a lot of great people who own restaurant business.

I don't know.

I'm not fearful of it.

I'll still eat out.

And I enjoy that and enjoy doing that.

But as a whole, we don't know, we may have some, the demand is what's gonna create the change.

What are people gonna demand from us, as farmers, is gonna be interesting.

(truck honking) (light upbeat music) (train rattling) (light upbeat music) - Yeah, you're gonna see farmers growing different crops that have a longer shelf life.

I anticipate there'll be a shortage of, you know, fresh produce with lack of logistics throughout the world.

You know, people think we can always import food from other countries which I don't think is true.

And then we also need to look at, you know, food safety.

I think people don't understand is we're fortunate in the United States.

We grow the safest crops in the world at a cheapest price and the diversity of crops that we grow, just in California, we grow over 350 different crops.

We supply, you know, 60% of the fruits and vegetables to the United States.

And people understand that food is the safest in the world.

You know, I don't really want my food to be imported from a third world country from a dictator who doesn't like us.

I think we can all remember back when, you know, the oil embargo and OPEC and we were all waiting in lines to get gas, you know, depending upon what our license plate was, we could, you know, get gas on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and other folks could do on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

As far as the food supply, I don't wanna be dependent upon, you know, that type of third world countries having control over our food supply.

That's why American agriculture and supporting the American farmer in today's environment is now more important than ever before.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production funding for American grown.

My job depends on ACC provided by, James G. Parker Insurance Associates, Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years, by Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice, and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair; family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(upbeat music)