Michigan Farmer Forced To Dump 40,000 Pounds Of Cherries To Make Way For Import Crops
“Cherry Capital Of The World” Traverse City, Michigan is known as one the largest producer of cherries in the United States. Farmers there sell their crops everywhere, literally.
According to one farmer in Traverse City a government marketing program is forcing these cherry farmers to dump extremely large portions of their crops and make way for imports instead. Literally wasting tons of cherries letting them rot so that import cherries can be sold?
Marc Santucci of the eighty acre Santucci farm shared this news on the thirtieth of July on his Facebook in a post that has since went viral. These farmers are being forced to dump fourteen percent of their tart cherry corps on the ground, leaving them to rot. This is being forced on them by a very outdated agreement imposed on them by the United States Department Of Agriculture.
What makes this even worse is that these farmers aren’t even allowed to donate any of these cherries they literally have to let them rot. This ‘rule’ is supposedly in place in order to add stability to what can be unpredictable yields crop from year-to-year cherry growers. But for people who are smaller or even medium scale cherry farmers like the man who spoke out on this matter the rule can be a very big issue and overall hinder the farm itself. Santucci does not have processing equipment thus meaning he has no choice but to leave the crops to rot. This rule only benefits the large farmers who have access to processing equipment. This is such a large waste.
What do you think on this matter? Should this ‘rule’ be changed or stay in place?