The
COVID-19 pandemic has hit the meat industry hard in the United States. Ten
thousand workers, who have to work shoulder to shoulder in the packing and
processing plants, have been infected with the virus. Dozens have died. So many
workers have gotten the virus, that many processing plants have had to close.
By last count, 38 plants have had to close at one point or another since the
pandemic began.
The
result of all of these plant closings has been a dramatic reduction in the
processing meat, particularly pork. When plants shut down, farmers aren’t able
to deliver their hogs. As a result of massive consolidation over the past
generation, where there once were hundreds of meat processing companies, today
there is just a handful. And many processing plants are so huge that they alone
process a couple percentage points of the nation’s pork. So when just one of
these plants closes down, it has a huge impact.
In
addition to the massive scale of the companies and plants that dominate the
pork industry, it has become an industry that relies exclusively on just in
time delivery. That means hog farmers, who themselves have seen massive
consolidation to where farms produce tens of thousands or even hundreds of
thousands of hogs each, have had to time their operation to deliver hogs at a
set weight at set times. Most pork processing plants, for example, are designed
to process hogs that weigh no more than 300 pounds. Anything larger than that
wouldn’t fit in the chutes, would be so tall it could jump out of the pens, and
in general would be too big for the finishing barns and the processing plants
to handle. Given that most commercially raised hogs hit 300 pounds at about six
months, if a farmer isn’t able to deliver them at the planned time to the processing
plant, the farmer suddenly has a major problem on their hands.
Most
modern hog farms have out of necessity had to become so in sync with the just
in time delivery standards of the industry, that they don’t have extra barn or
pen space for pigs if they’re not able to be sold. The price of hogs rises and
falls, meaning farmers are always vulnerable to price fluctuations, but
literally not being able to move their hogs to market has not been a problem
that farmers have had to face in generations. If your farm is designed to
deliver 500 hogs a week to a processing plant, and suddenly that plant closes
and there is nowhere else to send them, you can imagine how big a problem that
will become in a very short period of time.
Right
now hog farmers are scrambling to deal with this crisis. Some are changing the
feed mix of their hogs to try and slow down their growth. And many farmers are
trying to be creative in where to house the undelivered hogs. But this problem
is fast taking on gigantic proportions, and its growing with each passing week.
At this point it looks like literally millions of hogs are going to have to
euthanized.
A
tiny handful of hogs can be butchered by the farmers themselves, or artisan
butchers, but the scale of the problem dwarfs those kind of outlets. And the
hogs can’t even be donated to food shelves, since the food shelves would need
to send the hogs to a processing plant before they could distribute. Right now,
the leading idea is start creating massive landfills that millions of hog carcasses
could be dumped in, and then bulldozed over.
Unfortunately,
there don’t appear to be any easy, short term solutions. This unexpected crisis
is however deeply rooted in capitalism. The massive consolidation of the
industry, the harnessing of farms into giant, specialized producers of only
what is most profitable and best suited to the typical needs of the corporate
leviathans that dominate this industry, are what brought us to this point.
It
doesn’t have to be this way though. In a socialist planned economy agriculture,
rather than rely on heavily specialized factory farms, could instead be
organized on a more adaptable mixed approach based on crop rotation, mixed crop
and livestock operations and organic production. The food processing industry,
likewise, could be structured in a more adaptable manner that is scaled to
serve the surrounding region, rather than have giant plants that service the
entire country. In a lot of ways, large scale production is more productive,
but it generally fails to take into account the massive, vulnerable supply and
delivery chains. It results in massive pollution, and lacks the flexibility to
deal with things like today’s pandemic. Today’s industry was designed around
the sole goal of maximizing profits. What we need is an industry that is
designed for human needs, and that takes the environment into account. Lets use
this horrible crisis to redouble our efforts to help make such a more just and
rational society a reality!
>> The article above was written by Adam Ritscher.
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