Processing plants unable to process when workers are out sick with virus
Source: BBC News
The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table. This is what the predicament looks like on a Minnesota farm.
When Mike Boerboom enters the “nursery” – a long, low building lit astonishingly bright – a sea of piglets parts in front of him. The clatter of 5,800 sets of hooves is deafening. But within moments they calm and creep back towards him, their pink snouts in the air, jostling one another for the chance to inspect their visitor.
Dressed in khaki coveralls, rubber boots and plastic gloves, Boerboom looks out over the dozens of pens teeming with animals, one of 40 barns in southwest Minnesota that contain Boerboom pigs once destined for slaughter, butchering, and eventually, grocery stores around the country.
“It’s mind-blowing to look at all the pigs in here,” he says with a joyless smile. “With the situation that’s going on, there’s a chance that none of these may end up in the food chain.”
Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.
Although chicken and cattle farmers are facing a similarly paradoxical situation, as are milk and egg producers, because of the tight time frame between when a pig is born to when it is ready for slaughter, some of the most drastic actions are occurring on these farms first. According to the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, an estimated 10,000 pigs are being euthanised every day in the state.
Around the US, 170 meat and poultry processing facilities reported coronavirus cases. According to the CDC, nearly 5,000 workers have fallen ill. At least 45 have died.
Meanwhile, the outbreaks led 38 factories to cease operations for days or even weeks. Because of the highly consolidated state of meat processing in the US, those closures led to what some analysts say could be as much as a 50% drop in meat production.
Although President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week deeming meatpacking facilities “critical infrastructure,” seven more plants have shut since then.
Once pigs reach 350 to 400 pounds they are too large for slaughterhouse equipment. Continuing to feed hogs that will never be sold is a drain on the farm’s bottom line. And new piglets are being born in sow houses every day. Farmers simply have no place to put them.
Meat Shortage Coming To America
Jethro