-Off the open roads of America are communities
battling the uncertainty of the coronavirus
and fighting to stay afloat.
-A quarter of our price has been lost on account of this,
and that's just for one month.
It's not gonna recover anytime soon,
and we may not have even seen the floor yet,
depending on how things go.
-In northwest Alabama, the rolling hills
and bright flowers paint the landscape.
Agriculture is king.
And farmers are in a serious bind.
-It's like somebody knocked us on the ground,
and for four or five years
we just continually got kicked in the ribs.
And we've had some price improvement
over the last few months.
It was like we were all finally able
to start getting up off the ground,
and as we were bent over dusting ourselves off,
somebody came and just kicked us in the teeth
and knocked us right back down.
And from the looks of it, as bad as things have been,
the potential is for this year to be even worse.
-Will Gilmer is a third-generation dairy farmer.
This small but robust operation has been producing
since the 1950s and has seen its ups and downs,
but nothing like 2020.
As demand for milk and cheese plummets,
Dairy Farmers of America says farmers are dumping about 3.
7 million gallons of milk each day.
-If we were to stop milking our cows,
physically it wouldn't be good for them,
but it would also be very difficult for those cows,
when we were ready to resume milking,
there would not be anywhere close to an immediate return
to their production levels.
So as bad as it is to say,
really our only option on milking cows
is to continue doing it.
And if we have to dump the milk, either on our farms
or if it's dumped at a processing facility
or we just have to sell it way below what it costs us
to produce it,
for the long term, for our farms and for our cows,
that's really the only option we have.
-And according to Gilmer, people in this part of Alabama
are more worried about the economy
than the potential impacts of the virus on their health.
And it's not that farmers or people in the community
don't care about each other, because they do.
It's just that in Lamar County here,
there are less than 15,000 residents,
of which less than 10 of those people have confirmed COVID-19.
Gilmer doesn't know where to turn.
The schools and restaurants who usually buy
his products are closed.
And though he'd like to see it put to good use,
it's not that simple.
-If fluid milk is not being sold at retail,
what can we do to get it in food banks?
I mean, the last thing we want to see
is milk dumped out on the ground.
The problem we get into there is just the milk plants
don't have the processing capability
to be able to take all the milk that we're producing now,
as cheese plants have been shut down
because there's not the demand for cheese,
as other plants are having to get shut down
because they don't have --
you know, for the safety of their workers.
-Get that plugged back up without making a mess on you.
-In Cullman, Alabama,
north of Birmingham, Ben Haynes raises cattle
and farms wheat, corn, and soybean.
-Yeah, cattle that have lost 20% or 30% of their value
out here in the pasture.
And neither one of us can really do anything about it.
-As restaurants have shuttered,
people are eating more meals at home,
and they're stockpiling more food.
According to the latest Nielsen data,
meat purchases are up 50% at grocery stores nationwide,
but keeping it on the shelves is a challenge.
-It's a production issue and a logistical issue
and a transportation issue.
It's not a supply issue at all.
You know, the American food supply is not in danger.
It's not been threatened.
We just got to figure out how to get stuff
from my pasture to your plate.
-Haynes believes his industry will adapt to the virus,
but he knows there are more lean times ahead.
-Some folks are probably gonna get sick.
Some more folks are gonna get sick, and that's awful.
But we got to find that balance of being able to exist
financially and economically and still mitigate and control
that risk that we face from a health standpoint too.