‘We are working as hard as we can work. But what’s good for the grocery business is bad for the restaurant business.’

“Prices fell by 20 cents a pound in a week, which is a lot,” Sawyer said. Producers ought to be at about the break-even point for profits right now, he added.

Typically, chicken prices rise in the spring because it’s the beginning of grilling season, and some big sport events, which have been canceled, increase sales.

“We really had a March Madness, but not with basketball,” Sawyer said.

At the Fieldale Farms chicken processing plant in tiny Baldwin, about an hour northeast of Atlanta, workers are showing up and processing 3.2 million chickens a week, said President Tom Hensley.

“We are working as hard as we can work” to keep grocery shelves full, he said. “But what’s good for the grocery business is bad for the restaurant business.”

Sales there have slowed to a trickle, leaving many processing plants and warehouses overstocked, according to last Friday’s USDA market-price report.

Tom Super, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said producers are doing everything they can to keep employees safe during the pandemic.

“Food service demand has obviously taken a big hit.” he said. “Companies have been working to shift production and packaging from food service to retail, but that takes time. We have not experienced any long-term plant closures as of today.”

And if there’s a good side to the Great Recession, it left the surviving companies in better shape, Sawyer said. “One thing we know for sure is, if this does look like a more difficult spring and summer, the companies are far less debt laden today than they were 12 or 13 years ago,” he said.