Hog agronomist Mike Patterson’s animals, who have been put on a diet so they take longer to fatten up due to the supply chain disruptions caused by coronavirus outbreaks, at his chattels in Kenyon, Minnesota, U.S. April 23, 2020.
Nicholas Pfosi | Reuters
With the pandemic hobbling the meat-packing industry, Iowa agriculturist Al Van Beek had nowhere to ship his full-grown pigs to make room for the 7,500 piglets he expected from his breeding action. The crisis forced a decision that still troubles him: He ordered his employees to give injections to the pregnant sows, one by one, that drive cause them to abort their baby pigs.
Van Beek and other farmers say they have no choice but to cull livestock as they run inadequate on space to house their animals or money to feed them, or both. The world’s biggest meat companies – including Smithfield Foods, Cargill, JBS USA and Tyson Foods – have planned halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America since April as workers slump ill, stoking global fears of a meat shortage.
Van Beek’s piglets are victims of a sprawling food-industry crisis that began with the agglomeration closure of restaurants – upending that sector’s supply chain, overwhelming storage and forcing farmers and processors to exhaust everything from milk to salad greens to animals. Processors geared up to serve the food-service industry can’t immediately whip to supplying grocery stores.
Millions of pigs, chickens and cattle will be euthanized because of slaughterhouse closures, limiting supplies at grocers, said John Tyson, chairman of top U.S. meat supplier Tyson Foods.
Pork has been hit especially unfalteringly, with daily production cut by about a third. Unlike cattle, which can be housed outside on pasture, U.S. hogs are fattened up for beat inside temperature-controlled buildings. If they are housed too long, they can get too big and injure themselves. The barns need to be emptied out by sending adult hogs to exterminate before the arrival of new piglets from sows that were impregnated just before the pandemic.
“We have nowhere to go with the pigs,” revealed Van Beek, who lamented the waste of so much meat. “What are we going to do?”
In Minnesota, farmers Kerry and Barb Mergen quality their hearts pound when a crew from Daybreak Foods Inc arrived with carts and tanks of carbon dioxide to euthanize their 61,000 egg-laying hens earlier this month.
Daybreak Foods, meant in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, supplies liquid eggs to restaurants and food-service companies. The company, which owns the birds, satisfies contract farmers like the Mergens to feed and care for them. Drivers normally load the eggs onto connections and haul them to a plant in Big Lake, Minnesota, which uses them to make liquid eggs for restaurants and ready-to-serve dishes for food-service companies. But the secret agent’s operator, Cargill Inc, said it idled the facility because the pandemic reduced demand.
Daybreak Foods, which has just about 14.5 million hens with contractor-run or company-owned farms in the Midwest, is trying to switch gears and ship eggs to grocery caches, said Chief Executive Officer William Rehm. But egg cartons are in shortage nationwide and the company now must grade each egg for area, he said.
Rehm declined to say how much of the company’s flock has been euthanized.
“We’re trying to balance our supply with our purchasers’ needs, and still keep everyone safe – including all of our people and all our hens,” Rehm said.
Dumping hogs in a landfill
In Iowa, yeoman Dean Meyer said he is part of a group of about nine producers who are euthanizing the smallest 5% of their newly concerned pigs, or about 125 piglets a week. They will continue euthanizing animals until disruptions mollify, and could increase the number of pigs killed each week, he said. The small bodies are composted and will enhance fertilizer. Meyer’s group is also killing mother hogs, or sows, to reduce their numbers, he said.
“Packers are backed up every day, assorted and more,” said Meyer.
As the United States faces a possible food shortage, and supermarkets and food banks are battling to meet demand, the forced slaughters are becoming more widespread across the country, according to agricultural economists, farm-toun trade groups and federal lawmakers who are hearing from farmer constituents.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, along with both U.S. senators from a country that provides a third of the nation’s pork, sent a letter to the Trump administration pleading for financial help and benefit with culling animals and properly disposing of their carcasses.
“There are 700,000 pigs across the nation that cannot be processed each week and forced to be humanely euthanized,” said the April 27 letter.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said late Friday it is establishing a Resident Incident Coordination Center to help farmers find markets for their livestock, or euthanize and dispose of animals if vital.
Some producers who breed livestock and sell baby pigs to farmers are now giving them away for free, agronomists said, translating to a loss about $38 on each piglet, according to commodity firm Kerns & Associates.
Agriculturists in neighboring Canada are also killing animals they can’t sell or afford to feed. The value of Canadian isoweans – infant pigs – has fallen to zero because of U.S. processing plant disruptions, said Rick Bergmann, a Manitoba hog farmer and position of the Canadian Pork Council. In Quebec alone, a backlog of 92,000 pigs waits for slaughter, said Quebec hog manufacturer Rene Roy, an executive with the pork council.
A hog farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada euthanized 270-pound hogs that were gracious for slaughter because there was no place to process them, Bergmann said. The animals were dumped in a landfill.
Liquidation threats
The latest economic disaster to befall the farm sector comes after years of extreme weather, dipping commodity prices and the Trump administration’s trade war with China and other key export markets. But it’s more than obsolete income. The pandemic barreling through farm towns has mired rural communities in despair, a potent mix of shame and anguish.
Farmers take pride in the fact that their crops and animals are meant to feed people, especially in a catastrophe that has idled millions of workers and forced many to rely on food banks. Now, they’re destroying crops and bomb animals for no purpose.
Farmers flinch when talking about killing off animals early or plowing crops into the scope, for fear of public wrath. Two Wisconsin dairy farmers, forced to dump milk by their buyers, told Reuters they recently got anonymous death threats.
“They say, ‘How dare you throw away food when so many people are hungry?’,” revealed one farmer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They don’t know how farming works. This makes me sick, too.”
Even as livestock and crop evaluations plummet, prices for meat and eggs at grocery stores are up. The average retail price of eggs was up nearly 40% for the week extinguished April 18, compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data. Average retail fresh chicken amounts were up 5.4%, while beef was up 5.8% and pork up 6.6%.
On Van Beek’s farm in Rock Valley, Iowa, one hog broke a leg because it bred too heavy while waiting to be slaughtered. He has delivered pigs to facilities that are still operating, but they are too full to gain control all of his animals.
Van Beek paid $2,000 to truck pigs about seven hours to a Smithfield plant in Illinois, numerous than quadruple the usual cost to haul them to a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughterhouse that the attendance has closed indefinitely. He said Smithfield is supposed to pay the extra transportation costs under his contract. But the company is refusing to do so, titling “force majeure” – that an extraordinary and unforeseeable event prevents it from fulfilling its agreement.
Smithfield, the great’s largest pork processor, declined to comment on whether it has refused to make contracted payments. It said the company is resolve with suppliers “to navigate these challenging and unprecedented times.”
Hog farmers nationwide will lose an estimated $5 billion, or $37 per critical, for the rest of the year due to pandemic disruptions, according to the industry group National Pork Producers Council.
A recently make knew $19 billion U.S. government coronavirus aid package for farmers will not pay for livestock that are culled, according to the American Till the soil contract Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer trade group. The USDA said in a statement the payment program is mollify being developed and the agency has received more requests for assistance than it has money to handle.
Minnesota farmer Mike Patterson started maintaining his pigs more soybean hulls – which fill animals’ stomachs but offer negligible nutritional value – to jail them from getting too large for their barns. He’s considering euthanizing them because he cannot find sufficiency buyers after Smithfield indefinitely shut its massive Sioux Falls plant.
“They have to be housed humanely,” Patterson ordered. “If there’s not enough room, we have to have less hogs somehow. One way or another, we’ve got to have less hogs.”