Tag: Pork

OM in the News: The Pig Supply and Demand Problem

“The American pork industry has a problem: It makes more tenderloin, ham, sausage and bacon than anybody wants to eat,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Feb 10-11, 2024). 

If younger Americans don’t start buying more pork, annual consumption will drop by 2.2 pounds per capita over the next 10 years.

From giant processors to the farmers who supply them, they are in a predicament largely of their own making. They made production so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply. U.S. demand for pork is 9% less than what it was 20 years ago, but farmers produce 25% more.

The rise of industrial-scale hog farms, steadily increasing crop yields and growing overseas demand helped supercharge the U.S. pork industry in the late 20th century, and since the 1980s, pork production in the U.S. has doubled. The industry will produce nearly 28 billion pounds of pork this year, cleaved from roughly 125 million hogs.

Pork contributes $57 billion to the U.S. economy and employs 610,000 people. In Iowa, the top pork-producing state, hogs outnumber people nearly 8 to 1. That zeal for efficiency and expansion are a factor in the current troubles. Practically everything that goes into raising hogs is now significantly more expensive: machinery, services, equipment, repairs, building materials, livestock-feed supplements and labor.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, beef was king among American consumers and pork held second place, but chicken overtook pork in 1986 as poultry production skyrocketed, making it the cheapest of the big three meats. By 1993, chicken became the most-eaten meat in America. Religious prohibitions in Judaism and Islam limit pork’s popularity, along with a sense among some that pigs are too smart to slaughter. On the other hand, some consumers are more passionate about their love for bacon than any other meat.

So American pork producers increasingly bank on consumers in other countries. The industry exports 25% to 30% of product. Sales to China, the world’s top pork-eating nation, surged following a hog-disease outbreak in the country in 2018. Producers in the U.S. responded by expanding capacity even further, with new processing plants in Iowa and Michigan. Chinese pork producers rebuilt their herds, however, and exports to the country have plummeted over the past two years, contributing to U.S. oversupply and pressuring meatpackers’ profits.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What options do pork producers have? (Hint: see Supp. 7 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text on page 308)
  2. How has technology played a role in the imbalance?

OM in the News: The Great Bacon Shortage

Americans love few things more than bacon, writes TNR (Aug, 10, 2021). And now, as California prepares to implement wide-ranging standards mandating more humane housing for pigs, the media have been filled with dire predictions about the coming “bacon apocalypse.”

The vast majority of the 130 million pigs slaughtered for meat in the U.S. every year come from “factory farms,” where animals will spend their entire lives confined indoors as they are fattened for slaughter. This economies-of-scale model of producing standardized animal commodities is predicated on squeezing as much productivity as possible from female pigs. It relies on individually confining 7′ x 2′ metal cages into which pregnant sows will be locked for the 114 days of their gestation, unable to turn around or stretch.

Crates are objectively cruel and have been at the heart of animal rights campaigns for decades, producing promises from major processors like Smithfield Foods and major fast-food chains to shift some of their operations to crate-free systems.  But even if local producers are obliged to go cage-free by new regulation, most bacon sold in those states will come from leading pig-producing states like North Carolina and Iowa, where crates are standard. (About 96% of all factory-farmed animals come from such crate systems.)

In 2018, California passed Proposition 12,  giving pork producers until January 1, 2022, to conform to new standards, which included giving breeding pigs 24 square feet of space. Prop 12 applies not only to California-based producers but to all producers who want to sell pork in California, including those in places like Iowa.

Given that Californians consume 255 million pounds of pork every year, Prop 12 has the power to shift how pigs are produced around the U.S. But retrofitting factory farms is expensive–in the billions of dollars– and changes how most pork companies produce their animals. These costs that might be borne by already highly indebted “contract farmers” who work with major processors like Smithfield and Tyson.

But even in gestation-stall-free systems, sows may be locked in individually confining farrowing crates to nurse their young, injected with drugs so that they can be impregnated artificially, and have their piglets euthanized if they don’t gain weight fast enough. In industrial animal production, cruelty is systemic, endemic, and inescapable, even if it can be moderated by things like cage-free regulations. And, of course, all animals produced for food, regardless of production system, are slaughtered.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Discuss the productivity implications of this new law.
  2. Discuss the ethical implications of the pork industry.

 

OM in the News: How Many Hogs Can Be Safely Slaughtered Per Hour?

 

Headlines this past week have touted the benefits to global sustainability of eating more vegetables and less meat. But the demand for pork seems to keep increasing. “The federal government is poised this month to adopt a rule that would essentially turn the largest pork processing lines in the U.S.into the autobahn: no speed limit”‘ writes The New York Times (Aug. 9, 2019).

Currently, plants are allowed to slaughter a maximum of 1,106 hogs per hour. As hogs move down the slaughter lines, U.S. inspectors stationed at each plant examine them and remove any part potentially harmful to consumers. But pork producers have pushed for a change to inspection regulations that would do away with the speed limit and reduce the number of federal inspectors. For those in favor of the change, the advantages are clear. Plants would be able to slaughter more pigs and, therefore, make more money. The government would save money because it would not employ as many inspectors.

The U.S. currently assigns 7 inspectors at various points along the slaughter lines at pork plants, who look at, examine and sniff carcasses for signs of disease and contamination. In the new model, 2-3 federal inspectors per shift would be on the lines, overseeing plant employees who would take over time-consuming labor like removing lymph nodes to test for disease. Two others would perform other tasks like sanitation checks.

As for whether faster lines are more dangerous for workers, the Food Safety and Inspection Service said that was not in its jurisdiction. Line speeds, it said, were historically determined by the ability of federal inspectors to examine and evaluate the meat. The issue of worker safety, it said, falls to the OSHA.  There is no national database where all packing houses report injuries and accidents. (There have been five amputations or other severe injuries at a pork processing facility in Beardstown, Ill. since 2015).C

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What are the operations issues involved in this case?
  2. Discuss the worker safety tradeoffs.