The pork industry is headed toward a pandemic-driven bottleneck this fall that when again threatens to end in widespread killing and discarding of pigs, industry analysts say.
Meatpackers became hotbeds of COVID-19 spread out in the spring, requiring numerous of the country’s largest slaughterhouses to shut down or significantly scale back operations. Left with nowhere to turn their pigs into pork, a wave of news reports anticipated that farmers would kill and garden compost millions of hogs, at a time when panicked consumers had robbed grocery stores and crowds of the freshly unemployed turned to food banks for help.
No reliable price quote for the number of euthanized hogs exists. While some hog farmers did resort to culling their herds, they mostly managed to limit the scale of destruction. Some offered pigs at cut-rate rates or gave them away to people who had them custom-slaughtered at small processors. Others musical-chaired the animals around various barns to make space for inbound piglets. Many weathered the crisis by putting their pigs on diets that kept them from gaining weight, so they might still run through processing plants developed to handle pigs under about 300 lbs.
Now that the nation’s federally checked processors are back up and performing at around 95?pacity, slaughterhouses are attempting to work their way through the stockpile of around 2 million pigs– relieving pressure off an industry once on the verge of methodically gassing and shooting hogs predestined for the compost pile, and using a twinkle of expect farmers dealing with the prospect of mess up. With far more pigs than meatpackers can manage, hog farmers are consistently losing cash with each pig sold into the food cycle, collectively bleeding about $5 billion, according to the National Pork Producers Council.
But processors have just had the ability to pick up the slack due to the fact that pork production follows a seasonal pattern, with slower months falling over the summer season. As fall approaches, the number of piglets will grow. Butchering capability most likely will not. The outcome is that the pandemic-caused catastrophe that the industry avoided through improvisation will as soon as again resurface in a few months’ time.
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