Hog plant shutdowns are crippling the hog market and pork industry, even as consumer demand surges.
“It’s havoc,” said Tyler Fulton, the director of risk management for Hams Marketing.
“It’s a just-in-time (system). It’s a pipeline. It can’t stop.”
For Rick Bergmann, president of the Canadian Pork Council, sorting through the complications of multiple slaughter plant shutdowns and slowdowns is happening at the moment the failure of the farm safety net system has been thrown in stark relief.
“They don’t work for us,” said Bergmann, who has been talking to federal politicians, ministries and agencies about keeping farmers in business through the packing plant crisis.
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“Everybody is trying to do what they can to keep things going, but it’s difficult,” said Bergmann.
Last weekend, Smithfield Foods announced the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughter plant was closing for weeks after hundreds of its workers developed COVID-19. That plant, one of the largest in the United States, plays a vital role in processing midwestern U.S. hogs and has often slaughtered Manitoba animals.
“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” said Kenneth Sullivan, president of Smithfield.
“It is impossible to keep our grocery store shelves stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals.”
Temporary and extended shutdowns in Quebec and Ontario have backed-up pigs to farms from the Maritimes to western Ontario.
Extra safety precautions everywhere are slowing down the “chain speed” of production, reducing slaughter rates and exacerbating the problem with shutdowns.
This is happening, Fulton noted, in a situation of already-surging hog production in the U.S.
“In the context of the last 20 years (recent five percent gains in hog numbers) is pretty much the largest… we’ve seen,” said Fulton.
“There are going to have to be some tough decisions to make back at the farm.”
Similar problems are being experienced in the cattle industry, although cattle can often be slowed or held back for longer than hogs, which grow quickly and need to be kept within barns.
Poultry production is similar to hog production in that sense, and chicken farmers are taking drastic steps to deal with shutdown/slowdown-related lack of slaughter capacity.
One east coast chicken processing company has announced plans to euthanize chickens of contract growers on their farms because its workforce has fallen by half in recent weeks due to COVID-19, according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Those same discussions are occurring in the hog industry, Bergmann said. That is tragic because consumers both in North America and overseas are clamouring for pork, yet the grocery stores can’t get enough product.
“It’s really sad,” said Bergmann.
