The basic problems are:
1) More than 1/4 of all the swine on the planet have already died in the African swine fever outbreak. A haemorrhagic fever of hogs.
2) It has a lot further to go (Australia, Americas, Europe).
3) The virus can live for months in products like pigs ears for dogs.
4) It WILL get much worse.
5) Corn and soy will be in short supply for animal feed given present harvest.
6) China corn is in worse shape and they are buying a lot, so their shortage is coming here.
7) Remember that hay shortage? It isn’t any better.
8) Cattle herd culling is happening NOW holding beef prices down.
9) Beef prices will go up when the cull ends and herds are balanced to lower feed supply.
That pretty much says you have a few months to put away a freeser full, can some up, buy or make jerky, or buy some canned corned beef (or corn your own :-)
In 2020 meat prices will be higher, supply lower, and selection reduced.
Per African swine fever:
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This next one has nice graphs showing the current spike in cattle sales and lower weights.
All about the beef:
Musings from the Chiefio 
It will be interesting to see how the wild pig population reacts to African swine fever.
Texas has a significant wild hog problem. If it arrives here they will be a vector to move the infection around outside the normal commercial meat/food transport systems.
Being a wild population with high genetic diversity the wild hogs might actually be more resistant than the monoculture commercial hogs.
Then there are the wild Russian Boar x Ferrel Hog monsters running around the South… some the size of small cows and very genetically different. Seems some one imported wild Russian Boar and then there was an escape and “nature happened”…
https://www.click2houston.com/news/2019/02/27/theyre-big-hairy-and-scary-wild-russian-boars-invading-texas/
Also the Peccary of the Southwest. Related to pigs, but different rear toe number, tails different, and teeth vs tusks. So different genetics in some way, similar in others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary
So nature is currently running a BIG genetic remix experiment and in a few years, we see the result.
Were I going into the woods in the South, I’d rather have a .357 Mag. Or Sig on my hip…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogzilla
American pork producers have dealt with Swine flu before and use strong preventive practices for all disease control. Wild hogs are not likely to mix with domestic production herds. Swine flu does not wipe out herds, it just reduces their efficiency of growth. It is governments that wipe out the herds in an attempt to eliminate all vestiges of a infection. Infected animals that recover are immune but carry the genetic markers in their blood so they must be eliminated…pg
Oh I don’t know about shortage of pork in 2020. I expect there is going to be a lot of squealing about November 4. And not from the Police.
It is governments that wipe out the herds in an attempt to eliminate all vestiges of a infection. Infected animals that recover are immune but carry the genetic markers in their blood so they must be eliminated…pg
The African Swine fever is supposed to have a mortality rate of 96% but if they are not setting aside survivors to breed resistant herds they are idiots.
Although some of these numbers imply a lower mortality.(or that culling action took place before the disease process could run its course)
http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/programmes/en/empres/ASF/situation_update.html
Yunnan Province: on 13 November, MARA received report that ASF was detected in a farming household in Jietou Town, Tengchong City, Yunnan Province; 177 of the 261 pigs became sick, of which 97 died [reference1].
That is a mortality rate of 54.8% for those that showed symptoms. (97/177) and implies 66% contracted the disease.
Like the Avian flu the Chinese tend to use blunt instrument controls (ie just kill them all and start over).
@P.G.:
I was uncareful in calling this Swin Flu, as others have done, when in reality it is African Swine Fever, a highly lethal (to swine) hemorrhagic fever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_swine_fever_virus
The mortality has been reported as between 20% and 75%.
I’ll fix my comment in the posting.
An article on the frozen in the ground sugar beet crop in the northern states.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-sugar-idUSKBN1Y10F9
I thought sugar beets were sturdier than that…
The reason they make sugar is as a kind of anti-freeze. Then again, they are a Mediterranean origin species, so maybe there’s a limit to the cold they can take and northern Great Plains exceeds it…
Here in Colorado they harvested the beets late in the fall, before the really cold temperatures set in. They were all out of the ground and stacked up by the time the cold temperatures set in.
Sounds like it was the timing (killing live crops in the ground) rather than the cold per se.
A short bit on beets here in Colorado from 2015 – note they also cannot harvest them when it is too warm, so warm temperatures and sudden shock to cold temperatures would pretty well wreck the harvest.
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https://northfortynews.com/beet-harvest-underway/