Beyond Big Meat

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meat comes from, the food system workers, covid-19, tw animal slaughter, animal death, current events

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Beyond Big Meat https://newrepublic.com/article/158679/beyond-big-meat-coronavirus-pandemic-meatpacking-monopoly:

chamerionwrites https://chamerionwrites.tumblr.com/post/636520074864410624/beyond-big-meat :

(This article gets pretty graphic in places, FYI.)

As ghastly as the scene captured in the Iowa Select video may be, it’s not so much proof of a single act of cruelty as evidence of 50 years of collective decision-making by the meatpacking industry and its government regulators alike, a consensus that has always worked to favor the efficiencies (and profits) of concentration and consolidation over the resiliency of distributed production. Iowa Select is the largest pork producer in the largest pork-producing state, delivering roughly 100,000 hogs to market every week, and all of those pigs are raised under exclusive contract to just two companies—America’s two largest meat-packers, Tyson and JBS. So in the third week of April, when Tyson confirmed https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2020/05/07/infected-workers-waterloo-plant-more-than-double-earlier-figure/3092376001/ more than 1,000 cases of Covid-19 among its packinghouse workers in Waterloo, Iowa, and the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota, simultaneously confirmed https://thefern.org/2020/04/mapping-covid-19-in-meat-and-food-processing-plants/ nearly 800 cases, forcing both to close down for two weeks, Iowa Select found itself with tens of thousands of hogs and nowhere to send them. Independent producers may be small enough to “stuff every barn full of pigs,” as one farmer put it, for a week or even two, but large-scale operations like Iowa Select, under contract to one or more of the country’s six giant meat-packers, have little leeway in how to raise their animals.

Contract agreements with those six packers—Tyson, JBS, Smithfield, Cargill, National Beef, and Hormel—provide producers with the security of knowing they have a buyer for their finished livestock from the moment they’re conceived, but that guarantee comes with extraordinary conditions. In order for meat-packers to capture the efficiencies of specialized, high-speed equipment at their large plants, they require farmers to have a precise number of animals ready on a particular week at an exact weight, and often those animals must meet even more refined specifications https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/mag/farming_sorting_perfect_weight, such as thickness and distribution of fat. For packers, however, contracts rarely come with conditions—not even for unforeseen circumstances such as their own plant closures. One small farmer in Minnesota complained to the Organization for Competitive Markets about just such a problem with the Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The company had contracted to buy his finished hogs for 38 cents per pound. When the plant closed in April amid more than 850 cases of Covid-19, it couldn’t receive his hogs for more than two weeks. When it reopened, and he began delivering loads, his hogs were over the contracted weight, so he was docked 20 cents per pound—significantly cutting into, if not eliminating, his profit.

As thousands of farmers found themselves in a similar bind, many chose to cut their losses. “Covid-19 has completely disrupted our food supply chain,” Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig said in May https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2020/05/20/iowa-farm-forced-euthanize-pigs-infiltrated-animal-activists/5232631002/, “and that’s forcing pork producers to make gut-wrenching decisions.” Rather than paying for additional weeks of feed, only to be docked by big packers, farmers began to mass-slaughter their hogs, and the industry expects to cull more than 10 million in all by year’s end. The methods approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for such large-scale culling are often deeply troubling. Besides ventilation shutdown, millions of adult hogs have been shot or given lethal injections https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/coronavirus-farmers-killing-pigs.html; piglets have been gassed or “thumped”—swinging newborns by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against a barn’s concrete floor. Pregnant sows have been aborted. And it’s not just hogs. In recent weeks, millions of hens have been gassed or doused in foam until they drown. Iowa State University has a hotline to help farmers cope with PTSD and depression as the logic of the food supply chain turns against them.

“Big operations are extremely cost efficient,” wrote Temple Grandin, a longtime proponent of humane animal handling, in a recent op-ed for Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/templegrandin/2020/05/03/temple-grandin-big-meat-supply-chains-are-fragile/#37844233650c. “The downside is the fragility of the supply chains, as Covid-19 proves. This pandemic is going to be a wakeup call.” As farmers across the country see “herd-thinning” expand into cattle feedlots, and as the losses for rural communities mount, many are asking whether the entire system needs dramatic reform. In late June, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey announced an investigation https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-booker-open-investigation-into-meatpackers-manipulation-of-covid-19-crisis-to-raise-prices-and-exploit-workers into the large meat-packers, questioning their “commitment to providing a safe, affordable, and abundant food supply to the nation.” A tight network of smaller producers, they argue, could help ensure that our food economy is more equitable for farmers, safer for packinghouse workers, and, for consumers, more resilient and reliable in the face of crisis. The current pandemic underscores that broader argument for a new system of meat production and distribution. Droving nearly six billion animals, some two-thirds of the total number of livestock slaughtered in the United States each year, onto the kill floors of barely 100 meatpacking plants owned by just six companies not only creates an impassable bottleneck; it has also produced a potential national security threat should our food supply chain experience a sustained disruption.

The current system, however, didn’t evolve by accident—and it is important to recognize that it was never intended to protect the American consumer, much less the American farmer or the American worker. To change, it will require nothing short of breaking up the Big Six and enforcing antitrust laws to their fullest extent. More than that, though, it will take a cultural change, in which we, as eaters, no longer see issues of labor, on the farm or the factory floor, as separate from questions of what is on our forks, and how it got there.