Giving Compass' Take:

• The COVID-19 pandemic is creating meatpacking bottlenecks, making it difficult to house and care for additional animals in these plants.

• This will cause major dilemmas for the meatpacking industry. Can donors step in with solutions? 

• Check out this COVID-19 pandemic toolkit. 

Across the country, meatpacking plants are shutting down over coronavirus outbreaks among staff. Since the start of April, huge meat firms like Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings, and Cargill have closed at least a dozen pork, beef, and chicken processing plants, per the Wall Street Journal. At least 3,400 people in meatpacking facilities have tested positive, and at least 17 have died, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting estimates.

And because of the intense concentration of the meatpacking industry, these facilities account for a massive share of America’s overall meatpacking capacity. As much as 40 percent of America’s pork-packing capacity is currently idle, by one estimate.

This won’t necessarily lead to meat shortages, as Nicole Narea explains (though it might cause spot shortages at your local grocery store). But it has severe consequences for the animals left on farms across the country.

And because of the intense concentration of the meatpacking industry, these facilities account for a massive share of America’s overall meatpacking capacity. As much as 40 percent of America’s pork-packing capacity is currently idle, by one estimate.

Pork and poultry production (and to a lesser extent beef production) is done on a “just-in-time” basis, explains Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue. Farms typically operate on the assumption that they’ll be able to send off mature hogs to slaughter so that hogs still being grown have room to live; there isn’t much excess capacity if the mature hogs have to stick around due to meatpacking bottlenecks.

So farms across the country are facing a massive dilemma: What do we do when there are millions of additional animals we don’t have space, labor, or food to care for? There are several options available, but they boil down to three big strategies:

  • Packing more animals into existing barns, which risks overcrowding in facilities that already don’t offer a lot of room per animal
  • Putting animals onto outdoor fields, where they cannot be protected effectively from predators and disease
  • Euthanizing animals en masse

Read the full article about meatpacking industry by Dylan Matthew at Vox.