The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his early-20th-century novel, “The Jungle.”
Many are giant, sleek refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and “gut snatch” hog and beef carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors. The jobs are often grueling and sometimes dangerous, but pork and beef producers boast about having some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.
Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency and profit, have become major “hot spots” for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers. The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production.
After decades of consolidation, there are about 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, processing billions of pounds of meat for food stores each year. But a relatively small number of them account for the vast majority of production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of slaughtering and processing in the United States, according to Cassandra Fish, a beef analyst.
Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, is like closing an airport hub. It backs up hog and beef production across the country, crushes prices paid to farmers and eventually leads to months of meat shortages.
“Slaughterhouses are a critical bottleneck in the system,” said Julie Niederhoff, an associate professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University. “When they go down, we are in trouble.”
The ripple effects of the virus are now being felt across the entire meat supply chain, all the way to grocery store freezers.
More than a dozen beef, pork and chicken processing plants have closed or are running at greatly reduced speeds because of the pandemic. This past week, the number of cattle slaughtered dropped nearly 22 percent from the same period a year ago, while hog slaughter was down 6 percent, according to the Department of Agriculture. The decline is partly driven by the shutdown of restaurants and hotels, but plant closings have also caused a major disruption, leaving many ranchers with nowhere to send their animals.
Even as one prominent meat executive warned on Easter that the nation was “perilously close” to a meat shortage, state and federal regulators have been sending mixed signals to the industry about how to deal with the crisis.
In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem requested publicly that Smithfield Foods close its huge pork facility in Sioux Falls after testing revealed that the plant accounted for nearly half the coronavirus cases in the city and the surrounding county. But federal officials had been repeatedly urging the company and other meat producers to find ways to keep their plants running because of their importance to the food supply, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
By Thursday, the tests had revealed that the pork plant was the nation’s single largest “hot spot,” with about 16 percent of the 3,700 employees testing positive for the virus. The hospitalization rate among the workers has been relatively low because they tend to be younger, said Dr. David Basel, a vice president at the Avera Medical Group in Sioux Falls, who has been involved in the testing of the Smithfield employees.
Dr. Basel praised Smithfield for encouraging its employees, many of whom are refugees and immigrants from Latin America and Asia and speak 80 different dialects, to get tested. Doctors made instructional videos in Nepalese and Spanish, and tracked down and tested workers who had been in close contact with infected employees.
“The numbers are improving after the plant closed,” Dr. Basel said. “I am feeling more optimistic this week.”
Still, the high infection rate raised questions about whether Smithfield had done enough to carry out social-distancing protocols and to supply protective gear. At least one worker has died from the virus, according to the state.
On Thursday, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention toured the Sioux Falls plant, an eight-story facility that churned 24 hours a day alongside the Big Sioux River, producing 5 percent of the nation’s pork. The agency is expected to release recommendations in the next few days on how to prevent another outbreak when the plant reopens. The company has not given a date.
Before the plant closed this past week, the company had provided employees with face shields and masks and installed plexiglass barriers in certain areas to separate employees. But in reality, it may be difficult for any meat plant to accommodate social distancing and remain as profitable. Jobs with titles like “gut snatcher” require people to work closely, slicing open pigs and pulling out entrails.
“It is not going to be easy to get workers six feet apart,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University’s medical school. “If you space people out, you reduce productivity.”
Officials in the meat industry have also argued that South Dakota’s decision to not issue a stay-at-home order may be contributing to the outbreak, because it has left relatives and neighbors of plant employees free to mingle. South Dakota officials have said residents should exercise “personal responsibility” and practice social distancing.
“That’s a very, very high rate,” Dr. Schaffner said of the infections at the Smithfield plant. “But it’s difficult to know how much of the transmission occurred in the workplace or in the community.”
Some meat companies have expressed reluctance to test workers, saying such targeted testing creates the false impression that meat plants are the main culprits for the spread of the virus. The more aggressively employees are tested, the more cases emerge, putting pressure on plants to shut down.
“Everybody wants to test meatpacking employees, but nobody is testing the communities around them to show what’s the baseline,” said Steve Stouffer, the president of the fresh meats division at Tyson Foods. “And until we know the baselines, my question has always been: Are we the cause or are we just the victim of our surroundings?”
In some places where the company operates, Mr. Stouffer said, the company has faced pressure to “shut down at all costs.”
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We’ve been tried and convicted already in certain spaces.”
Another major meatpacking company, JBS, changed its mind about large-scale testing over a single weekend.
On April 10, JBS announced that it had worked with Gov. Jared Polis and other officials in Colorado to obtain thousands of coronavirus testing kits for its work force at a beef production facility in Greeley where there had been a surge of cases. But after it began testing the next day, the company changed course, saying it would not administer the tests and would instead close the plant until April 24 so employees could go into quarantine.
The company recognized the “potential positive impact of temporary closure on public health,” Cameron Bruett, a JBS spokesman, said.
On Wednesday, Colorado officials reported that four workers at the JBS plant had died of the virus. Mr. Polis has urged the federal government to “help get JBS open as soon as possible, because of their critical role in food security,” said Conor Cahill, a spokesman for the governor. “It is still unclear whether JBS will conduct testing.”
Large numbers of employees have become infected in other businesses where people work close together, like grocery stores and e-commerce warehouses. But the pandemic has caused more serious disruption in the meat industry, where decades of consolidation have given outsize importance to a relatively small number of plants.
In the 1980s and ’90s, companies like Smithfield, which is now owned by a Chinese pork company, bought out competitors and designed massive plants that could slaughter more than a million animals a year. At the same time, meatpacking became more concentrated in a few states where animal feed is grown, like Iowa and South Dakota.
In the pork industry, the portion of hogs slaughtered in plants that could process more than one million a year rose to 88 percent in 1997 from 38 percent in 1977, according to the Department of Agriculture. A bigger plant meant more profits on the initial investment.
In recent years, critics of the meat industry have blamed that rapid consolidation for the spread of animal diseases like avian flu, as well as the rise of environmentally harmful practices like factory farming. The pandemic has reignited those longstanding concerns.
“When you get to this kind of size, it increases risk,” said Ben Lilliston, who helps run the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a farm advocacy group. “When something goes wrong in a really big plant like this, you have a really big problem. These are vulnerable systems.”
