In normal times, the bulk bagging machine in Owyhee Produce’s packing facility spins 50,000 onions—red, yellow, and white ones—into orange netted bags each hour. The bags go to a produce distributor and then to a food-service business: a restaurant chain like Applebee’s or Chili’s, a baseball park, a university dining hall.

The bulk bagger at Owyhee Produce, an onion, asparagus, and mint farm straddling the Oregon–Idaho border, isn’t getting much action these days. Most food service venues are closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders. Distributors are struggling to reroute produce before it spoils. Farmers are grappling with hiccups in the supply chain and are hunting for customers to take their crop.

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Americans still have to eat during a pandemic. But they’re eating differently: less at restaurants and cafeterias, more at home. Changing where a farm’s output goes is easier said than done. The people who plant, slaughter, process, pack, and move it aren’t sure what’s next.

More than 60 percent of Owyhee’s 800 acres of onions typically end up in food service. This month, the operation dumped about 1 million onions—part of last year’s crop, which was harvested in the fall. Shay Myers, the farm’s general manager, says the reason was simple: No one would buy them.

Similar scenes are playing out all over the country: fields of leafy greens usually bound for restaurants plowed under or left to rot; fresh milk, once destined for dairy processors who package it in small cartons for school kids, poured down drains. Meanwhile, grocery and convenience stores are working to keep some products in stock, and food banks grapple with feeding the surge of out-of-work Americans.

Dog Star Hops in Michigan spent four years building relationships with breweries and restaurants, many of which are now closed. Courtesy of Jim Mikesell/Dog Star Hops

Producers occasionally dump their crops when prices fall so low that it’s not worth the cost of pulling them out of the ground, says Roland Fumasi, an agricultural economist with RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness. But dumping in the first weeks of the Covid-19 crisis has been widespread—and unprecedented. “For foods that are perishable, you either have to find it another home, another buyer, immediately, or you walk away from the crop,” he says. Generally, 15 percent of fruit and 35 percent of vegetables are eaten outside the home.

The problems start with packaging. Owyhee is lucky: The large growing operation is also a packer, which means it controls how its onions are packaged. As the bulk bagger sits idle, its smaller bagging machine is busy filling 3- to 5-pound bags of onions, more commonly found at grocery stores.