June 10, 2020

US meatpacking operations restart

Most pork plants in the US have resumed production, with plants running at about 82% of their normal capacity, said David Preisler, CEO of the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, MPR News reported.

A month ago, America's pork farmers were in crisis. About 40% of the country's pork plants were shut down because they had become hot spots of coronavirus infection.

Pork producers who had been shipping, collectively, almost half a million hogs each day to those plants suddenly had no place to send of all their animals, and little space to house the equal number of new piglets that are born every day.

Pork producers and industry analysts said that if factories did not reopen quickly, they had be forced to euthanise millions of hogs on their farms.

But that worst-case scenario seems to not be happening. According to estimates of pork producers and officials in the hardest-hit states of Minnesota and Iowa, hog farmers have been forced to kill and dispose of fewer than 200,000 animals so far.

"Farmers are pretty inventive people," says Preisler. He says farmers made some quick adaptations—they converted older buildings into additional housing for hogs, fed the animals low-energy rations that kept them from gaining weight rapidly, and sent some of their animals to local butcher shops. Others hogs were shipped halfway across the country, from Minnesota to Pennsylvania or California, to processing plants that could handle them.

Minnesota's Board of Animal Health acquired two 80-acre sites that could be used to compost truckloads of hogs. As of May 29, the sites had accepted 17,058 hog carcasses. They could handle many more. Perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 carcasses have been trucked to rendering plants, which convert them into basic materials like grease and protein powder.

In Iowa, the state is offering financial help to farmers who need to euthanise hogs. Farmers applied for funding to dispose of about 25,000 animals but have not yet told the state how many of them were euthanised. In mid-May, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig told Iowa Public Radio that farmers in his state had been forced to kill fewer than 5,000 market-ready hogs so far.

Hog industry officials say they have heard of few cases of euthanised hogs in other major pork-producing states.