'We grew up in agriculture--we've had a lot of experience of going without'

This is the seventh episode in The Post’s coronavirus podcast series, which each week brings listeners inside a different person’s experience of the pandemic. Previous episodes have chronicled a week in the life of an emergency-room worker, an NBA player, a blues guitarist, a minister, a librarian and a city council member.

In this episode, we peer inside the life of Terry Swanson, a 71-year-old farmer and cattle rancher in Colorado. On his ranch, he raises calves until they’re ready to be sold to larger stockyards.

Many such independent ranchers had already been struggling before the pandemic, as the meat industry consolidated and drove down the prices it paid ranchers for their cattle. But with coronavirus outbreaks shuttering some major meat-processing plants and reducing production at others, ranchers such as Swanson are having even more trouble making ends meet.

Share your story

Tell us how your life has changed due to the coronavirus outbreak, and help us share first-person accounts of life during the pandemic.

• Submit a voice recording(desktop only)
• Email us a voice memo(from your mobile device)

Previous episodes:

• 'Good luck, everybody'
• 'You never signed up for this’
• ‘I cannot hold it all’
• 'For me, it’s all the blues'
• 'First thing's first, I gotta beat this game'
• ‘It is a pretty significant hole in the system’

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• Subscribe to our daily news podcasts: washingtonpost.com/podcasts

Explore more first-person accounts of the pandemic:

A multimedia oral history of the virus's impact