The closure of meat processing plants because of the coronavirus situation has backed up the meat supply chain so severely that animals are being slaughtered and discarded because there is nothing else to do with them.
JBS USA has reopened a shuttered pork processing plant in Worthington, Minn., solely to kill up to 13,000 hogs a day. The slaughter will be performed by a skeleton crew of no more than 20 workers at the plant, which normally has a workforce of about 2,000. The hogs will not be processed or used in any way. The Worthington plant stopped normal operations on April 20.
Meanwhile, a Mid-Atlantic poultry trade group has announced that it will “depopulate” nearly 2 million chickens on poultry farms because there is no processing capacity to harvest them.
Delmarva Poultry Industry, which represents growers in Delaware and parts of Virginia and Maryland, said that the birds will be euthanized at a designated processing company. The group did not name the processor, but the Baltimore Sun reports that animal rights activists protesting the slaughter believe it to be Allen Harim, a processor headquartered in Millsboro, Del.
“With reduced staffing, many plants are not able to harvest chickens at the pace they planned for when placing those chicks in chicken houses several weeks ago,” Delmarva Poultry Industry said in a statement.
President Trump signed an executive order April 28 ordering meat and poultry processing plants to remain open. The chairman of Tyson Foods took out newspaper ads April 26 warning, among other things, that animals would have to be discarded if the plants remained closed.
