When several large pork processing plants shuttered last spring because workers got sick with COVID-19, it sent many who raise livestock into a panic.
“Farmers would call me and say: ‘My pigs are too big, I have nothing to do with them,’” Minnesota Department of Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen said at a hearing before the Minnesota House Agriculture Finance and Policy Committee.
Petersen said one desperate farmer even asked: “Is there going to be any help for me? Because I’m going to go buy two pistols today and shoot a thousand pigs.”
“I had farmers calling me in tears extremely just not knowing what to do, saying: ‘I’m going to haul all my hogs up to northern Minnesota and turn them loose,’” Petersen said.
Livestock is a huge industry in Minnesota. The state is the country’s second-largest producer of hogs and the biggest producer and processor of turkeys. But the plant closures revealed weakness in that system, as farmers were forced to euthanize hundreds of thousands of animals — an outcome that now has many of the biggest players in Minnesota agriculture debating ways to strengthen the food system.
[image_caption]Commissioner Thom Petersen[/image_caption]
Outbreak disrupts food chain
In April, several large meat processing plants around the Midwest shut down temporarily after workers got sick. The company JBS USA closed a Worthington pork plant, Tyson Foods shuttered an Iowa plant and Smithfield Foods also closed a South Dakota plant. The trend was not limited to pork: Hormel closed turkey plants in Minnesota amid outbreaks and cattle plants in Green Bay, Wisc. and Long Prairie also were idled or ran on diminished capacity.
Not only were workers sick, but farmers suddenly had nowhere to bring animals.
Hog farmers were in a particularly tricky spot, Petersen said at a state House hearing earlier in January. While cattle can be held on the farm a little longer, hogs are raised on a tighter schedule and are typically slaughtered at specific weights. The plant closures soon caused backups, and farmers had nowhere to take the animals.
MDA responded by using about $2 million from the state’s coronavirus fund to pay for euthanized animal composting. It also worked to find other fixes, such as moving hogs to empty barns and finding burial sites for pigs that wouldn’t threaten to spoil groundwater. Petersen also worked with officials in states like Tennessee, Louisiana and California to find slaughter plants to take hogs. Rendering plants — which kill animals and turn them into things like pet food — also worked longer hours.
Petersen said MDA even bought supplies for euthanizing pigs and built mobile trailers to use to kill animals.
Despite those efforts, Minnesota farmers still put down hundreds of thousands of hogs and hundreds of thousands of turkeys, Petersen said. David Preisler, CEO of the Minnesota Pork Board, estimated more than 450,000 hogs were put down in Iowa and Minnesota, though the majority of those animals went to rendering plants so they weren’t completely wasted, Preisler said.
State pushes to help smaller processing plants
In the wake of the problems caused by the processing plant closures last year, one idea has become increasingly popular: expanding the number and size of smaller meat processing operations to reduce the state’s reliance on big plants, particularly in the hog industry. Preisler said 10 plants take roughly 85 percent of the pigs raised in Minnesota today.
Large meat processing plants that sell products across state lines are federally inspected, but there are two categories of smaller plants under state oversight. Mid-sized plants, which the state refers to as “equal to” inspected plants, can process meat for commercial sale. Plants known as “custom exempt” can process meat for things like selling directly from a farm to a customer.
MDA has already worked to help smaller meat processors expand or open more quickly.
Nicole Neeser, director of the dairy and meat inspection division at MDA, said the agency created a grant program to help meat processors buy equipment like coolers or bacon slicers that would help them expand. The state also cut the time for a plant to upgrade to “equal to” from several months to weeks by loosening requirements and assigning caseworkers to help plants directly. She said MDA plans to continue its efforts to “fast track” plants.
The state-inspected plants helped take many hogs when the larger processing establishments went down, though that made it harder for the farmers who typically use the smaller businesses to slaughter or process their hogs.
Neeser said the state added four “equal to” slaughter operations since the pandemic began, an increase of roughly 20 percent in the number of such plants, and other existing businesses increased capacity. (One plant helped alleviate a shortage of sheep and goat processing capacity, Neeser said.) The number of custom-exempt plants increased from 227 to 243 between April and December, though some custom-exempt and equal to plants closed due to normal attrition and the pandemic’s impact on restaurants and other businesses that serve food.
While several other slaughter and processing establishments may open this spring, Neeser said many are still booked through 2021 and even into 2022. “Our meat processors, small meat processors, are still pretty full,” she said.
Lawmakers also look to make changes
Neeser said she expects new proposals, potentially through the governor’s budget plan set to be released Tuesday, to continue helping expand the industry of smaller meat processors.
So far, adding or growing smaller plants seems to be a popular idea to help the state prevent the backups that happened last spring. It’s a top priority for the Minnesota Farmers Union, a left-leaning ag group, and Walz characterized the organization’s efforts as fighting “monopolies that kill free markets.”
[image_caption]Gary Wertish[/image_caption]
Sen. Torrey Westrom, a Republican from Elbow Lake who chairs the Senate’s Agriculture and Rural Development Finance and Policy Committee, said smaller meat processing plants help local people buy local products and are important small businesses in rural areas. “What last year really highlighted was the importance of these processing plants in our rural communities,” he said.
Westrom said Republicans hope to identify and slash duplicative and burdensome regulations that might slow or prohibit smaller processors from expanding or opening. And he said the state could use federal money to fund more grants for processors to buy things like equipment. He also urged the state to put more money toward developing high-speed internet in rural areas, in part so farmers can more easily find and sell directly to customers.
Westrom and Preisler, from the pork board, didn’t hold Walz’s view that large plants hold something of a monopoly, and described the smaller meat processors as more “complementary” to the big businesses.
[image_caption]State Sen. Torrey Westrom[/image_caption]
Still, Preisler said adding more capacity in smaller plants is a good thing for farmers. “I would also look at it as something that would be important rural economic development for small towns,” he said.
Minnesota lawmakers are likely to debate a range of plans aimed at helping the agriculture system withstand such shocks again.
State Rep. Samantha Vang, a DFLer from Brooklyn Center who serves as vice chair of the House Agriculture Finance and Policy Committee, said the state should pay more attention to helping farm and plant workers who are “the core of these operations.”
Many are immigrants and refugees and are sometimes unauthorized and may not have health insurance. Vang said the state could give benefits to people who were excluded from CARES Act stimulus payments because they’re undocumented or because they are citizens but their parents or family members are undocumented.
But she also said DFLers support continuing MDA efforts to help small meat processors and the push to add workforce training. Vang said she agreed with Walz that larger meat processors are effectively a monopoly. “It’s a matter of being able to develop a much more adaptable system,” she said.
This was a fascinating article. I learned a lot from reading it. I don’t think most people are aware of the supply chain that allows them to buy a pound of bacon at the grocery store. There are serious problems with our food system, as you pointed out. Thank you very much for the research and the good writing.
Some hog producers saying, “I’m going to haul all my hogs up to northern Minnesota and turn them loose.” No, No, No! Then we’d have a feral pig problem, like Texas, an environmental disaster, worse than simply dumping them in the river.
Meat packing plants, large or small, present serious challenges to water treatment and resources.
More plants might be okay, but the local sewage treatment plants where they are located must have both the capacity and efficacy to support fat, blood and hard-to-process elements in the effluent.
WATER should be #1 when planning these plants. Regulations must be enforced big or small.
The processing plants have strict effluent requirements. They have their own treatment plants. They do not discharge directly into a city sewer system.
Perhaps you are unaware of the family butchers who will pick up an animal off the farm and cut it up for you.
We have a few of these kinds of businesses that I know of that do not have modern treatment facilities.
I’ll not expose the private meat cutters here, but if you raise a few animals for the restaurant specialty breed pork for example, you can’t get it butchered at JBS. See also the new demand for halal meats– again not prepared in the big packing plants.
That would mean there would be a very small amount of effluent then. Easily diluted in the waste water stream.
Regulations? Surely you mean protections.
Take your cue from conservative word-meister Frank Luntz. When you use corporate speak, you’ve already lost the battle. We don’t want to regulate anything, we simply want protections, for our air, our water, out health.
Who can be against that?
This is how unchecked capitalism works when faced with a pandemic. Any disruption in the system where hogs that are of an economically efficient size are deemed to be un-economical are euthaninized while the masses go hungry. These massive processing facilities can now only process hogs that meet a strict criteria. Any deviation from that forumula results in hogs with no market value that need to be destroyed.
Can you please elaborate further on how the current industrial ag system is a result of “unchecked capitalism”? Do you have a solution?
I hope you get an answer from Jim, but I’ll chime in here with the observation that meat packing is and has been the number one attraction for cheap immigrant labor all over the country.
The very states that joined in the oppression and stigmatizing of the immigrants from the south actually brought them here to work in poultry, beef and pork processing, and to work on dairy and hog farms where labor was scarce at the wages offered.
These folks risked their lives every day during the pandemic, and have suffered more so Americans could maintain several sources of meat protein and a percent of their food budget smaller than most other people on the planet.
They came here to work. They were used to racialize the country to get T**** and all there other racists so afraid they would abandon democracy to keep them down and get rich people elected. We need to embrace the least among us and stop using them to do work we won’t do.
Capitalism demands the very cheapest inputs to return the largest profits in the short run. It’s inhumane.
Capitalism is focused on satisfying the demand by consumers. If consumers wanted something different and acted on it by more carefully focusing their demand, then processing could change. If a company wanted to set up a new kind of processing that met all of your requirements and then advertised how much better this style was then the consumer would choose the most desirable style to them. But you’ll quickly find that what you think is important is actually not important to consumers. It just shows there would likely be a better outcome if more emphasis was placed on educating consumers rather than criticizing capitalists.
As a result of 40 years of non-existent anti-trust enforcement, much of our food production and food processing industries are now controled by a select number of very large operators. Production is streamlined to the point where any disruption along that supply or distribution chain results in catastrophic failure.
Those millions of hogs that were euthanized this spring never would have happened had we maintained our network of smaller, less streamlined operators who could have better managed such disruptions. The system we have in place now is designed strictly to deliver the most shareholer returns under optimal conditions.
Great observation and thank you
“the majority of those animals went to rendering plants so they weren’t completely wasted” So I imagine the pet food supply must have had an enormous increase. Has the demand for dog food increased accordingly? Why hasn’t the price of my dog food dropped?
Of course I realize I will get vilified, but the solution is to eat less meat. It’s not difficult actually. Meatless Mondays is a good start. At least with small farms many animals are allowed to graze. Corporate farms are the worst for many things: run off, inhumane conditions for the animals, and the profit goes directly to the corporation in some far off state. Plus horrible working conditions for the slaughterhouse workers.
If you’re going to eat meat, please buy from local farmers. There are many in your area, just look to find them.
While your admonition is understandable and certainly sympathetic, the biggest problem is exactly why we had the glut of animals when the plants closed. There is a lack of small local butchers to use as alternatives. You can buy animals from local farmers and that might be good for the farmer but it won’t do you any good to buy from a small local family farm when there are no small local family butchers to process the meat.
The irony of sending so many animals to the rendering plant is that it all happened during a time of unprecedented food insecurity. I don’t know what any of those livestock producers did ahead of asking for assistance from the government to deal with their livestock, but I doubt it was much. Of course, some of the issue is about risk avoidance. Personally, I feel like I could butcher and clean a turkey for my home without much risk (probably less risk than a meat processing plant, actually). But some of the producers would see such a solution as only partial (and completely impractical for larger livestock) and with too much work on their part, let alone worth the risk of lawsuits if I fail to do a good job and make my family sick. Still, as far as I can tell, there were few, if any, creative solutions that might have actually fed some people who could really use better food access.
I would like to see more decentralization of meat processing, providing more jobs and more options for consumers. It probably won’t create a truly competitive environment given the reliance of the larger processors on low labor costs (and human rights, frankly) and the American preference of cheap over all else.