Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
Is there anything Climate Change can’t do?
How climate change and extreme weather are crimping America’s pie supply
Many of the ingredients in Mike’s Pies’ pies — wheat, berries, honey, soybean oil, among numerous others — have been hit hard by climate and weather effects, including droughts, wildfires and power shutdowns around the world. That’s sending prices soaring and, combined with a scarcity of workers and other hurdles, is causing mayhem throughout the global food supply chain.
“We are cutting every order that we ship; we can’t fulfill the obligations,” Martin said.
For consumers, the impact on the food business means that stocks of seasonal items, from entrees to desserts, are significantly below pre-pandemic times, with meat and pies at the highest risk of being out of stock entirely, according to IRI, a global data provider for retail companies. Food prices are also way up, rising 5.1 percent in October over last year, the fastest rate in years, according to inflation data released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Economists broadly expect that the labor and supply chain disruptions should work themselves out as the pandemic fades, but they say climate and weather impacts will remain major threats to food and a growing number of other industries.
“There is no place to run and hide from extreme weather events,” said Michael Swanson, Wells Fargo’s chief agricultural economist.
While the world’s food conglomerates and agricultural giants are acutely aware of the climate threat, near the end of the supply chain, Martin is more focused on tackling whatever crisis is front of him — regardless of the cause.
“I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. I could walk in, and they say we can’t get boxes or we can’t get sugar,” he said. “Orders are going through the roof, prices are skyrocketing and we’re having to order way out and to order more than we’ve ever ordered.”
Mary Provatas, general manager of Mike’s Pies and Martin’s right-hand woman, got ghosted. It started on July 30, when their graham cracker crumbs vendor, with whom they’d done business for 20 years, emailed to say labor shortages and equipment breakdowns meant their Aug. 5 order wouldn’t be available for pickup for five more weeks. The vendor scrounged up only a quarter of their order in September, then things fell silent again, no crumbs in October.
“I sent them an email, ‘Are we done doing business, or aren’t we? Just be frank with me,’ ” Provatas recounted. It went back and forth, with Provatas sending nudgy emails nearly daily. Still, no crumbs. “They finally came back and said, ‘Do you want to cancel the rest of your orders, what do you want to do?’ At some point, you gotta be done, right?”
For Mike’s Pies, this was a crisis. The company was facing record demand from customers, such as Red Lobster and Winn-Dixie, and it was down about a dozen workers. The price of most ingredients had climbed 10 to 15 percent. The company couldn’t get Dole crushed pineapple in the big cans, flaked coconut or Hershey’s fudge and caramel.
But the graham cracker crumbs — those were the foundation for so much of what the company sells. They came from Richmond Baking, which has been in business since 1902 and manufactures the crumbs in Indiana and Georgia. Bill Quigg, the company’s president, says Richmond was having its own severe shortages.
“The labor supply is a challenge. The number of pounds we can produce is directly related to how many people we can employ and how many show up on a given day,” he said.
At the same time, he was facing massive price increases for the core ingredients in the crumbles, such as soybean oil as well as honey and spring red wheat.
Like Martin, Quigg isn’t certain how much the climate and weather are to blame. “I’m not the commodity expert to answer that question,” he said.
But the commodity experts say they definitely are.
Wheat prices on the commodities market are at historic highs, hard red spring wheat in particular, said Janis Abbingsole, vice president of operations for King Arthur, one of the country’s largest flour companies.
“Every consumer package goods company is feeling it — no matter what their business is,” she said. “The pressure on the hard red spring wheat is a result of weather and drought conditions. Mother Nature bats last.”
Historic drought conditions destroyed or damaged spring wheat crops in the West, Northern Plains and Southwest, key growing regions for wheat, says Kyle Holland, an analyst covering oils and grains for Mintec, which provides global commodity pricing data. Total U.S. bushel numbers are at the lowest they’ve been since 2002, he said.
And graham crackers are made with graham flour, a specially milled whole-wheat product with all of the bran added back in.
Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, said a miller has to re-gear his entire system to mill graham flour, and “right now, no one is stopping their whole system to do that.”
Honey, another critical ingredient in graham cracker crumbs, is among those products facing the most weather- and smoke-related impacts, many of which are tied directly to climate change, says Dave Gustafson, professor of biological systems engineering at Washington State University.
Honey has been decimated by drought and fire because it leaves bees with nothing to eat. Beekeepers across the United States, largely those located in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota, lost 45.5 percent of their honeybee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021.
Martin of Mike’s Pies sells about 1.7 million Key lime pies a year, but he has 20 other cakes and pies — Mississippi mud and Southern pecan pies, carrot and red velvet cakes. And his problems go well beyond graham cracker crumbs.
Tim Galloway, the chief executive of Wisconsin’s Galloway Co., which supplies Mike’s Pies with sweetened condensed milk, is having his own headaches; he says climate change is in part to blame. Dairy prices spike when animal feed prices soar, so that poor wheat harvest also affects what he pays.
“We’re seeing more dramatic weather shifts, [and] these factors influence dairymen in these parts of the country,” said Galloway, who buys most of his milk from Wisconsin. As input costs such as alfalfa for animal feed — this year 45 percent of alfalfa hay acreage in the United States experienced severe drought conditions — get more expensive, small, family-run Wisconsin dairies are closing. In 2019 alone, 10 percent of the state’s dairies shuttered, ceding ground to California, the nation’s top dairy state.
California dairy, mostly large-scale operations in the San Joaquin Valley, is also getting squeezed by the climate-related combination of drought, heat and the specter of increasing restrictions on irrigation. As droughts become more frequent and more severe, cows produce less milk and are more susceptible to diseases and infertility.
Extreme weather has affected Galloway of Wisconsin in additional ways. One of the contract packagers the company works with was shut down for six weeks because it couldn’t get plastic bags, fallout from last winter’s polar vortex in Texas, which triggered a global plastics shortage.
And then there are imports like vanilla.
The spice is grown primarily in Madagascar, according to Marcel Goldenberg, head of proprietary pricing at Mintec, which is at risk of a climate change-induced famine.
Goldenberg said the southern part of the island is completely dry and people can’t live there anymore. The people and the vanilla crop have moved north, but he says farmers don’t have the tools or the skills to grow it there, and a lot of the crop is dying because of weather that vacillates between too wet and too dry.
The food industry is sharply aware both of its impact on climate and its vulnerability to weather events. Agricultural companies such as ADM, Cargill and Bayer AG have pledged to work with farmers to adopt practices that will reduce atmospheric carbon and methane, and most major food conglomerates have committed to cutting their carbon footprint measurably.
But as extreme weather buffets supply chains and causes ingredient shortages, often these multinational conglomerates’ own production lines are safer. Shortages and labor-related limits on production capacity force suppliers to cut off smaller customers, according to Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a consulting firm that specializes in assisting food companies with supply chain risk management.
Martin is a big man, and his company is well known in pie circles. But he’s no Sara Lee. In the grand scheme of things, he’s small.
On a recent day, he zips past the rows of double ovens, each of which can fit 92 pies but are currently spinning with sheet trays of chocolate cakes. There’s a 500-pound vat of pumpkin cheesecake filling, waiting for its graham cracker crusts, and behind it is a whiteboard scrawled with the day’s orders. There are 2,016 Key lime pies to Winn-Dixie, 776 Reese’s peanut pies.
He stoops to pick up a long tail of shrink-wrap off the factory floor, glowers a bit. He keeps the place meticulously clean. In the coffee room is a sign that says, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here. We’ll train you.”
Martin wanted to retire by now, play more golf, pass the company along to his two sons and a son-in-law. The pandemic postponed that.’
Instead, he’s been hustling to get graham cracker crumbs. Provatas, his right hand, worked the phones until she found a new supplier, a Canadian company called Kinnikinnick that specializes in allergen-free baked goods. They’re three times the price of Richmond’s crumbs, and Martin doesn’t have strong feelings about gluten one way or the other, but any port in a storm.
“Do I say they are gluten free?” he wonders. “That helps sell pie in Colorado, but in Florida, not so much.”
His company moved into its new, much bigger factory near the start of the pandemic, but already he feels crowded with some of the “just in case” stockpiling he’s had to do lately.
“We’re trying to stay in front of it, but what should we load up on?” he said. “Some of the issue is, we don’t know what’s around the corner.”
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Supply chain disruption is a feature and not a flaw for the NWO. People on the dole not working while they just keep printing money and handing it out. And yep, climate change is another stinking propaganda war that the gullible lap right up just like the covidiots
If you keep putting the truth out there you will be labeled a ner do well by the elite and fact checked out to the camps for some remedial education. See you there.
I aim to please.
The labor shortage could also be the result of the covidiots dying and permanently injured. The only check the gooberment is handing out now are the child care credits of $300/month.
$200
Novel thought, bake your own pies. Have you seen the price for commercially produced pies? $15/$20 or more for quality pies. I know food costs are high but you could make several pies for the price and freeze a couple til needed. We never bought a pie back in the day…families made their own. My aunt made some damn good pies, my mother opted for cobblers. When our mothers said go pick a basket of peaches, you knew there would be one or the other baking that day.
They are better when my sister makes them
Climate change can not cure the left of it’s continued insanity.
In one of his recent speeches, RFK Jr. referenced the infamous Milgram Shock Experiment where 65% of those studied were convinced/prodded/cajoled/pressured into administering to unseen victims what they thought was a potentially fatal jolt of electricity by the presence and arguments of white-coat-clad “experts”.
I’ve come to believe that roughly 65% of the American public can be counted on to believe any bullshit the media peddles.
We know that almost all media stories circle back to one of three primary narratives:
1) climate change
2) get vaccinated
3) racism / “white privilege” (the homosexual/trans agenda is a subset of this)
It’s amazing to me that more people don’t see this and laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it.
They to ‘tupid.
Glad I’m still in the minority.
My dog took a dump on my living room carpet because it was raining too hard to take him for a walk. Now I could blame myself for being too lazy to put on my rain gear and take him out in the rain. But, I’d rather blame climate change for the dog shit on the carpet.
Look on the bright side. By 2030, you will have neither dog NOR carpet. Problem solved.
He may have a new carpet – and a new dog – but he won’t own either.
Software as a service. Floor coverings as a service. Friendship as a service (60 day subscription with automatically recurring billing of your CC until you’re maxed out: then, no more friendship for you, and it’s of to Fauci’s lab for Fido)
Funny… I use Honey Maid Graham cracker crumbs in several of my ice cream recipes. My local WinCo has been out for two weeks. I had no idea climate change was to blame… 🙄
Make your own graham crackers, there’s nothing esoteric or special about them. They were named after Sylvester Graham, a preacher from the turn of the century. He was all about whole wheat and graham crackers are made with whole wheat flour.
Graham Cracker recipe
½ cup shortening
¾ cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup milk
Directions:
Step 1
In a medium bowl, cream together the shortening and brown sugar. Stir in the vanilla. Combine the whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt, stir into the creamed mixture alternately with the milk. Cover and chill dough until firm.
Step 2
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to 1/8 inch thickness. Cut into rectangles. Place 1/2 inch apart onto the prepared cookie sheets.
Step 3
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven, or until crisp. Edges will be golden brown. Remove from baking sheet to cool on wire racks.,
You have a recipe for saltine crackers? When TSHTF, there are two things I can not do without: crackers and cotton underwear. I won’t ask about the latter.
Cotton Underwear Recipe
1 yard cotton fabric
1 elastic waistband
2 leg holes
1 trunk hole
Step 1
In a large skillet bring 1 yard of cotton to a simmer.
Step 2
Add leg holes
Step 3
Slowly fold in trunk hole, add elastic waistband to taste.
Serve warm.
Hahaha. Have tears running down my cheeks from laughing.
I think you got your washing/making instructions mixed together. In BRIEF, if you are serving this at your shindig, I will SPEED-On over. Better yet, post one of those video SHORTS, UNDER WHERE I can find them. You really aught to consider marketing them under the the label “Fruit of the Goon”.
Certainly a possibility, though my hands are usually very full making the ice cream… 😊
GCP- All crackers were sold out in the city, an ok supply down here in the country. I scored a new jar of peanut butter and a box of graham crackers the other day. It’s the little things that make life exciting pastor.
Agreed! When the poop hits the propellers we’ll sure appreciate those little things!
Better get cracking on this climate change disaster.
Or Mike’s Pies will go the way of the lonely Polar Bear…
Make your own pie crust…use butter, lard, shortening, whichever is available.
2 cups, plus 2 tablespoons Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup cold shortening or if you prefer, substitute cold butter, cut into ½-inch pieces, for half of the shortening.
6 to 8 tablespoons ice-cold water
Pastry blender or fork
Make a dough, roll it out and put it in your pie tin. Fill with whatever you want in a pie and then bake it.
If you have one of those processor machines, you can make pastry crust real quick. Easy peasy and save a ton of money not buying overpriced sweets that we don’t really need.
So instead of buying it we MAKE sweets that we don’t really need. Sweet.
Reading the article, it appears people not wanting to work is causing the shortages. People not wanting to work is a direct result of governmental actions taken during the Scamdemic.
For every governmental action, there is a quadruple and opposite reaction.
People not wanting to work is the direct result of people not – being worth a damn – wanting to work. Saw plenty of it, that, lonnnnng before the current lard-crust&pie con•fections. Lardassery has been common & typical my whole life, in fact. That bellcurve carbo-boop is just ballooning, via pusher-enablement, is all. “Ours is not to question why” “people” ~ ciphers ~ respond to incentives*.
*There is, as must be, too, a slice of the pie responding to this incentive: socialism for the “elite”/wealthy, “free enterprise” for everybody else. Lollipops for most, hamstring the rest. Force & fraud are two sides of a single coin, the single coin of most of the human realm.
The Weather Channel can find climate to be the root cause of everything. Anything to distract from the 100%failure of government.
Take away the ingredients so that planning ~ the recipe ~ is less & less possible & finally impossible to do.
Counterfeit currencies, counterfeit interest rates, counterfeit “nudges/investments” (like into owner occupied residential r/e), counterfeit rules/regs…encirclement, the killing ground, the pie’ce de resistance is futile.
And irony fortified it is: the encirclers ain’t the names out front. Or the names behind those. It’s all the schmoes who punch clocks for & cash checks from those names.
That’s how pogo gets his possum pie baked. And who can gainsay s/he don’t deserve it?
There’s lots of songs about it. Don McLean’s got pie sewn up. But here’s some other bakers:
Like Sammy ‘the bull’ said: We just want our piece of the pie. And when taking it by force/fraud “succeeds”…well, nuthin’ fails like success.
“Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our
society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen
which are acceptable only when they happen without force.” ― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
I wish Alaska would get some of that climate change. It’s below zero in Anchorage for the last week.
You know how it works, though, John: Cold weather doesn’t disprove climate change, but hot weather proves climate change. In fact, everything proves climate change. Even the rampant transgenderism is probably because people are so hot they lose their minds.
It’s a convenient excuse that only college students study in Econ class.
“Climate effects” are not the cause. Bad weather and bad government are the primary culprits, and no, bad weather has not increased because of a very minor change in the average temperature. Also, there was arson involved in quite a few of the wildfires.
This- https://wattsupwiththat.com/ – is a very good place to learn the truth about climate.
Watts still believes that the “Global Temperature Record” is on the up and up.
It isn’t.
Mmm soybean oil and processed ingredients. From scratch!
Climate change can’t skin this deer or clean this rifle.
“Climate Change” is the weather. It changes. What these proponents of CC do is fudge the #’s by selective massaging of the data range so it reflects their P.O.V.
We really don’t have any “climate emergency” and money should not be spent in that direction since measures we might take could have catastrophic results.
There are parallels to climate change and Miike’s Pies.
Climate Change is the same thing that occurs to me after I’ve eaten and digested one of Mike’s Pies.
Shortage of soybean oil? That’s not for eating. You burn soy, you don’t eat it. Burn it in a car, candles, anything but eat it… Thanks for the warning, “Mike’s Pies”…
What a bunch of blather. It is the solar minima that has resulted in a large and powerful La Nina in the Pacific ocean that has shifted the weather to the West. La Nina causes a persistent high pressure system above and below the equator and next to the West coast of north and south America.
Odd, lived in the Tampa Bay area for over 12 years and never heard of that company. Tampa Bay Times is a major leftist rag that hates DeSantis with a passion.
During the Covid nonsense, TBT tried to convince people to get the clot shot. Every week they would list how many people lined up in their cars to get the clot shot at the stadium in St. Petersburg Pinellas County across the bay. Made it sound popular. For fun, I totaled up the weekly numbers and it far exceeded the population of Pinellas County. What liars!
TBT is owned by the Poynter Institute and this is all you need to know…
A look at Poynter’s major donors should explain its SPLC connections and left-leaning bias. Under the heading “Largest funders of Poynter” on the organization’s website, one finds the prolific Open Society Foundations, run by progressive billionaire George Soros. Another major donor is the Tides Foundation, which also happens to be “[one of] the largest contributors to” the notorious leftist agitating group Media Matters, activistfacts.com reports. Media Matters, founded by Clintonite David Brock, focuses most of its efforts on trying to shut down conservative media voices. Free-market libertarian billionaire Charles Koch’s charitable foundation is also a donor, which shows an interesting connection between global capitalism and radical progressives like Soros.