Hog Euthanasia Threatens To Return This Fall
The pork industry is headed toward a pandemic-driven bottleneck this fall that once again threatens to end in widespread killing and discarding of pigs, industry analysts say.
Meatpackers became hotbeds of COVID-19 spread in the spring, forcing several of the country’s largest slaughterhouses to shut down or drastically scale back operations. Left with nowhere to turn their pigs into pork, a spate of news reports predicted that farmers would kill and compost millions of hogs, at a time when panicked shoppers had raided grocery stores and hordes of the newly unemployed turned to food banks for help. Similar chaos rocked the poultry industry and some producers of fresh fruits and vegetables.
No reliable estimate for the number of euthanized hogs exists. But while some hog farmers did resort to culling their herds, they largely managed to limit the scale of destruction. Some sold pigs at cut-rate prices or gave them away to people who had them custom-slaughtered at small processors. Others musical-chaired the animals around different barns to make space for incoming piglets. Most weathered the crisis by putting their pigs on diets that kept them from gaining weight, so they could still run through processing plants designed to handle pigs under about 300 lbs.
Now that the country’s federally inspected processors are back up and running at around 95% capacity, slaughterhouses are trying to work their way through the backlog of around 2 million pigs — easing pressure off an industry once on the verge of systematically gassing and shooting hogs destined for the compost pile, and offering a glimmer of hope for farmers facing the prospect of ruin. With far more pigs than meatpackers can handle, hog farmers are routinely losing money with each pig sold into the food chain, collectively bleeding about $5 billion, according to the National Pork Producers Council.
But processors have only been able to pick up the slack because pork production follows a...
