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Why are pigs being euthanized because of COVID?

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Why are pigs being euthanized because of COVID?

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Judy Woodruff: We're going to focus now on the questions around meat processing plants, worker safety and the food supply.While President Trump has signed an executive order to keep the plants open, a number of processing facilities remain closed.In Minnesota, a pork plant did reopen today briefly, not to resume processing hogs, but to euthanize a growing surplus of animals.Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro begins our look with a report on how this is playing out for farmers.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: It's spring planting time in Southern Minnesota. Soon, these vast prairies will sprout soy beans and corn destined for markets around the world.But the largest number of consumers they will feed are not human and not far away. Minnesota and neighboring Iowa are among the largest pork-producing regions in the world.Mike Patterson's family has been doing this for multiple generations. They are part of an elaborate food chain that ends, in this case, at the Smithfield plant 200 miles away in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.Like more than two dozen meatpacking facilities that have seen closure across the country, this one has been shuttered since April 11 after a COVID-19 outbreak. So has another nearby pork plant, JBS, in Worthington, Minnesota.Patterson says he's looking at staggering losses.

Mike Patterson: If we weren't able to harvest any of the hogs on our farm, we're looking at probably $450,000. And we're - we're not a big operation.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: This barn is one of three on Patterson farm. It holds 1,000 animals. And it's here that you get a sense of the scale of the industry that they are part of.The Smithfield plant in South Dakota, to where these pigs would normally go, takes in 20,000 pigs each day.

Mike Patterson: I don't think I appreciated the efficiency of the whole system, and when one piece of that system goes down. You know, I knew it, but, boy, I didn't - I maybe didn't appreciate it as much.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: While plant workers continue to receive 80 percent of their wages during the shutdown, it's hundreds of hog farmers like Patterson who say they stand to lose the most.Animals are brought to these so-called finishing barns from nurseries. Here, they are raised over 16 to 20 weeks to a nearly exact weight required by the packing houses like Smithfield. As they're moved out, a new batch of young animals is ready to take their place.

Mike Patterson: Obviously, those barns aren't empty. So where do those pigs go?

Fred de Sam Lazaro: So, you have some ugly options.

Mike Patterson: Definitely. I know, in the industry, there's been talk of euthanasia of swine or depopulation of harvest-ready hogs. That's something that we, as farmers, just absolutely, we don't want it to happen.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: A couple of hours away, the much smaller Sobocinski farm has just about 300 pigs, whose owner says they're really thriving.

Paul Sobocinski: Give the animals a little bit more freedom to move about.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Paul Sobocinski decided two decades ago to scale back from what he calls the industrialized system that now produces much of the nation's meat.Has it been the right decision financially?

Paul Sobocinski: This isn't perfect, but, overall, it's been a good decision.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: His animals are processed at a small nearby slaughterhouse, where no one has tested positive for COVID-19.The meat is sold through a national network of independent producers called Niman's Ranch. Sobocinski has long been an activist against a system that he says has concentrated power and profit in a few corporate hands, at the expense of both laborers and farmers.

Paul Sobocinski: Meat prices went down substantially because of the coronavirus. Who's grabbing all that money? Has food come down in the grocery store? No, it hasn't.I think it's important that we retool what we're doing out here. We need more local processing, so more of that is done here in the community. It helps build the community.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: For Patterson, however, it boils down to keeping pork prices as low as possible.

Mike Patterson: I understand that local piece of it, and I appreciate that. But how do we feed the masses and do it cheaply? You can't do that on a smaller scale. You need the - you need the efficiencies of size of scale to be able to get that done.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: The debate is not new and may well return post-COVID-19. Just how much are American consumers willing to pay for their food? And has the pandemic changed attitudes?But, more immediately, Patterson and hundreds of fellow hog farmers are watching anxiously for word on when the two mega-factories can reopen, tweaking the diet of their animals to slow their weight gain.

Mike Patterson: We have maybe bought a week to 10 days, trying everything we can to slow them down.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: When the plants do reopen, however, workers could be farther apart on the production line to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That would slow down the line, which, in turn, would mean fewer animals at the plant and more, Patterson says, in his barns with nowhere to go.For the "PBS NewsHour," this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kenyon, Minnesota.

Judy Woodruff: Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Judy Woodruff: We're going to focus now on the questions around meat processing plants, worker safety and the food supply.While President Trump has signed an executive order to keep the plants open, a number of processing facilities remain closed.In Minnesota, a pork plant did reopen today briefly, not to resume processing hogs, but to euthanize a growing surplus of animals.Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro begins our look with a report on how this is playing out for farmers.

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Safety precautions at meat packing plant

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Safety precautions at meat packing plant

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"Beef, chicken and pork could be as scarce as toilet paper soon because so many meat processing plants have been temporarily shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, industry experts are warning." - NBC News
When we moved to Iowa in 1970, having finished my Ph.D. work at Columbia University and starting as a professor at Iowa State, we were delighted to find a great bake shop, a small clothing store, bowling alley, a strong local newspaper, a movie theater and other "mom and pop" businesses in Nevada, Iowa, the closest town to where we lived, and in Ames, where we worked.

There was also a small butcher in Ames and Nevada. Each year, we ordered a half steer, which the butcher would cut into ground, beef, steaks, etc., and keep frozen in his business as we picked up what we needed.

Most towns, especially county seats, had a butcher and a meat locker. When Mr. Olson or Mrs. Swenson got sick, they shut their shops. We customers stayed away until they were better.

Then came the "mega butchers," who wiped out most local operation.

Whenever you consolidate an activity or facility to a few huge ones, you get efficiency of scale. But you increase risk and vulnerability. The coronavirus pandemic spreading through factory slaughterhouses is an example.

The Minutemen of Lexington and Concord realized that the British forces in the American colonies were vulnerable and easy targets because they fought in big, tight formations that made them "sitting ducks."

Instead, the "patriots" fought in a distributed, opportunistic way, moving swiftly in small numbers. They picked off British soldiers from the woods, ridges and marshes before disappearing into the shadows. No big concentration there.

When they won the Revolutionary War and created a new nation, a highly decentralized form of government was launched. The Articles of Confederation were a bit too loose and had to be rewritten, but the Philadelphia Constitution was careful to not overcentralize and left many important powers to the states that, in turn, gave authority to counties and cities. (The military today also avoids making huge concentrations of troops and assets where they might be at high risk.)

The sudden threat of a virus-driven choke of the meat supply chain as COVID-19 infects workers in the huge slaughterhouses is a grave alarm on the potential risks of excessive concentration.

Concentration of any force (the British) or product (meat processing) is risky. Today, only four huge companies - one owned by Chinese interests and another by a Brazilian company - account for around 80% of slaughterhouse production, according to the High Plains Journal. Only three meat-processing plants account for 95% of all beef production in Canada, per the Globe and Mail.

Unfortunately it's very hard to go back from dependence back to the small meat butcher in Nevada and Ames that we were patrons of back then. But maybe we can diversify a little bit again. The farmers who are now hostage to these giants would benefit as well.

It's called risk management.
Steffen Schmidt is a Lucken professor of political science at Iowa State University.

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U.S. paying the price of consolidation with meatpacking COVID-19 outbreaks

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"Beef, chicken and pork could be as scarce as toilet paper soon because so many meat processing plants have been temporarily shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, industry experts are warning." - NBC News When we moved to Iowa in 1970, having finished my Ph.D.

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The coronavirus outbreaks that have struck workers in meat-processing plants around the world are due to poor working conditions and living quarters in a sector that is in a "disastrous race to the bottom" in the quest for cheap meat, trade union representatives have said.

Meat plants have persistently been centres for outbreaks, with some of the biggest clusters in the US and Canada focused on slaughterhouses. According to the Food & Environment Reporting Network (Fern), which has been tracking the outbreaks, nearly 30,000 meat-plant workers across the US and Europe have been infected with the virus and more than 100 have died.

"The entire sector is in a disastrous race to the bottom, driven by the market and by consumer demand for cheap meat," said Peter Schmidt, the head of international affairs at the German food workers union NGG. Schmidt claimed modern plants in Germany brought in contract workers from Eastern Europe who were prepared to put up with low wages.

"The working conditions in these plants are the absolute worst; cold, close together, working at high speed. And the housing, it is like in slavery times. When we were looking at it, we found that people were having to share beds. You do a 12-hour shift and then you change over."
Coronavirus world map: which countries have the most Covid-19 cases and deaths?
US meat plants have been hit even harder than European plants, leading to a supply chain crisis involving at least 27,000 infections and 86 deaths, according to Fern. Several million farm animals have been euthanised. In May, Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep meat plants open.

Less dependent on contract workers living in shared housing than European slaughterhouses, a large part of the US workforce are migrants or refugees. "What we've consistently seen in places where there have been outbreaks is individuals that are ride sharing or house sharing," said Adam Speck, a senior commodity analyst at IHS Markit's Agribusiness Intelligence.

Speck believes the situation in the US is stabilising and many companies have made the necessary adjustments for their workers. "These companies want healthy workers. It is in their interests to look after them."

But Ben Lilliston, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, doesn't share Speck's optimism. "We still have workers dying here," he said. "The inherent problems in the way that packing plants are set up are still there." Under Trump, labour inspectors have been cut back, while production-line speeds have been increased, he said. Profits depend on workers being close together, working at high speed.

Some meat processing firms have suggested the chilled air in factories is to blame, rather than working conditions.

"That [cold] is an interesting hypothesis," said Prof James Wood, the head of the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge. "But you would need to exclude the challenges of not stopping close working between individuals and the substantial air movement that exists in/across many slaughterhouses and meat plants."

Schmidt said the coldness theory was an excuse. "That's absolute nonsense," he said. "They've tried to find excuses to get out of responsibility. Why are there no outbreaks in the dairy sector in this case? They also have cool sections, they deal with the frozen food sector. The outbreaks are because of the working conditions."

The German government recently announced plans to reform the sector. Health and safety will be improved, and from 1 January 2021, the use of subcontractors will be banned and large meat processing companies will only be able to use workers they directly employ.

Most observers believe that much deeper changes are needed. "The whole system is built on using low-paid, badly exploited workers," said James Ritchie of the International Union of Food Workers . "They may be charged excessive rent for their accommodation, or for transport from east Europe. It is dirty and dangerous work, and most people don't want to do it. So companies have to go looking for people who are prepared to do it and put up with the wages."
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Poor conditions in meat plants fuel Covid-19 outbreaks, say unions

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The coronavirus outbreaks that have struck workers in meat-processing plants around the world are due to poor working conditions and living quarters in a sector that is in a "disastrous race to the bottom" in the quest for cheap meat, trade union representatives have said.

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Poultry Worker's Death Highlights Spread of Coronavirus in Meat Plants

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Some employees are coming in sick, and one woman died after being ordered back to work. "Our work conditions are out of control," a longtime Tyson employee said.

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Opinion | The End of Meat Is Here (Published 2020)

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If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.

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(real or perceived?)

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Number and location of meat packing plants

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Number and location of meat packing plants