Making Meat and the Coronavirus in Historical Perspective
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Recently, outbreaks of COVID-19 at pork, beef, and poultry processing plants throughout the nation have cast a spotlight on the nation’s meat supply chain. Some of the world’s largest processors, including Tyson, Smithfield, Hormel, JBS, Conagra, and Cargill have all shuttered locations in response to Coronavirus outbreaks among their employees. In their analyses of the crisis, news outlets have emphasized the portion of the supply chain that flows from slaughter to consumer.
While angst over COVID-19 at processing plants and the ensuing breakdown of supply chains certainly justifies the media coverage, it misses opportunities to unpack the front end of the supply chain where some animals are currently being euthanized rather than being sent to idled slaughterhouses. This is no small problem. Recently, National Public Radio reported that millions of pigs will likely be euthanized as they approach and exceed 300 pounds in weight. Why? Can’t animal feeders simply slaughter their animals at larger weights? Certainly, Americans can stand for a little more fat on their pork chops?
Understanding the processing problem requires some examination of the historical contingencies that brought us here. During the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of hogs and cattle were raised on mixed farms where fattening livestock for slaughter was accomplished principally by feeding crops grown on the farm. It involved rotating fields and pastures to maintain crop diversity and soil fertility. Operators calibrated cultivation to synchronize with feed requirements and vice-versa.
Raising and processing livestock for the consumer market changed drastically in the post-World War II era. Cheap, overproduced, and subsidized crops such as corn and soybeans could be shipped to feeders whose operations focused entirely on rapidly fattening animals. As livestock were packed into tighter spaces, land costs could be minimized. Moreover, animals that moved too much were burning calories that ate into profits.
Rapid weight gain quickly became a function of more than just feeds. After World War II, one of the uses that chemical giants such as DOW and DuPont found for their new synthetic compounds, such as DDT, was to kill organisms that targeted livestock, thus eliminating environmental factors that slowed down growth. Pharmaceutical companies also played significant roles as they experimented with antibiotics such as penicillin and aureomycin. These became essential ingredients in animal feeds since they not only fought diseases endemic to animal confinement into claustrophobic spaces, but also functioned to increase rates of growth. Emerging companies such as Merck and Eli Lilly discovered that synthetic growth hormones could speed up the fattening process. Experiments with the hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) - at Iowa State and in the pens of cattle feeders such as W.D. Farr in Colorado - concluded that it could speed growth by as much as 30%. Within one year of F.D.A. approval in 1955, over 80% of all feedlot cattle were implanted with or fed DES. Within two decades, both DES and DDT were banned due to their toxicity, but not before industry concocted a host of other drugs and hormones to take their place.
Feeds, drugs and hormones were part of a larger story of engineering modern livestock to meet consumer demands for cheap meat protein. During the 1950s and 1960s, commercial producers, also called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), employed machines and computers to mix and deliver precise concentrations of feeds and additives calibrated to convert animal feeds to human food. Trucks rapidly displaced trains to move livestock to slaughter. As meat processing grew and became more heavily capitalized, smaller producers were pushed out and companies such as Tyson, Purdue, Cargill, and Smithfield placed their operations closer to the CAFOs.
The same technical precision used in CAFOs was employed by the processing plants. As heavily capitalized companies such as Tyson, Conagra, Smithfield, and Cargill came to dominate the processing market, they demanded that CAFOs engineer animals to be slaughtered within vary narrow weight categories and ages in order to meet real or perceived consumer demands for specific cuts and qualities of meat. Plant machinery and employees were also engineered to synchronize industrial slaughtering tasks with CAFO operations. Between 1945 and 1995, the time needed to move chicken from birth to slaughter decreased by half, while their market weight at slaughter increased by over 50%. Rapid changes also forced the average steer or heifer to spend approximately four months in a feedlot to gain the 300-400 pounds necessary to reach slaughter weight. Animals that continued to gain weight possessed little or no market value. This is exactly what is currently occurring as processing plants shut down and livestock reach slaughter weight.
There is an additional medical problem in all of this. Livestock are slaughtered young in part to avoid disease. They are fed a diet that, in type and quantity, defies their evolution. Their living conditions run contrary to nature. As a result, their lives in CAFOs are not only a sprint to slaughter, but a race against the disease clock. Cattle held longer in feedlots are more likely to develop liver abscesses and respiratory diseases. Chickens that grow too large suffer from musculoskeletal disorders. Commercially produced meat has a bio-engineered clock that will not suffer deviation.
So, why are feeders euthanizing animals? Our meat production system has been designed since World War II along very narrow industrial lines that do not tolerate variation. So, while we place a human face on how the COVID-19 pandemic is playing out in processing plants throughout the nation (and we should do this), we should also step back and evaluate the processes that made the crisis.