Where鈥檚 the beef? Pandemic exposes cracks in US food system.
Business is booming at Codman Community Farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, sales of pasture-raised meat and eggs have been up some 500%, says Jennifer Hashley,聽who lives on the farm and directs a farming sustainability organization affiliated with Tufts University. It鈥檚 hard to keep the farm store stocked. People who have never bought locally are buying out eggs and lamb and lettuce.
鈥淧eople are coming out of the woodwork to purchase directly from us,鈥� she says.
The situation is quite different for the farmers Dermot Hayes contacts regularly in his role as professor in agriculture and life sciences at Iowa State University. There, facing a dramatic slowdown in processing plants, hog farmers have been making the excruciating decision of whether to slaughter and discard tens of thousands of piglets 鈥� next month鈥檚 food 鈥� or to dispose of fully grown pigs who should have been going to grocery stores. Either way, the economic and emotional impact is devastating.聽
Why We Wrote This
Despite shortages, many food watchers have been impressed with just how well the U.S. food supply has held up in crisis. Still, the pandemic has exposed shortcomings in a complex and often convoluted food system.
鈥淚t鈥檚 truly awful,鈥� Mr. Hayes says. 鈥淚鈥檝e been on calls with them, and there are people crying on the phone.鈥�
Editor鈥檚 note: As a public service,聽all our coronavirus coverage聽is free. No paywall.
Across the country, the pandemic has rippled through the food chain and agricultural sector, often in divergent ways. Americans are facing shortages of some staple foods, such as flour and dried beans.聽Price fluctuations, such as the dramatic spike in the cost of eggs last month, have fueled cycles of panic buying. Images of empty supermarket shelves and farmers plowing under crops have gone viral across social media. Farmers, meanwhile, are facing unprecedented financial challenges, even as some direct-to-consumer operations are flourishing.聽
Throughout this, many agricultural economists point out, overall access to food for Americans has remained remarkably stable. But the challenges and changes have been unnerving to many. And this has led some to take a closer look at the country鈥檚 food supply chain 鈥� perhaps for the first time 鈥� and wonder whether there are ways it could be improved.聽
鈥淚t鈥檚 incredible to think about how this system works,鈥� says Trey Malone, an assistant professor and extension economist with Michigan State University鈥檚 department of agricultural, food, and resource economics. 鈥淟ess than 1% of the American population works in agricultural production. All of us rely on this system. And 99% of us don鈥檛 think about it. This is one moment where you think, 鈥極h my goodness, I don鈥檛 know where this food has come from.鈥欌��
Cracks emerge
The food supply chain in the United States looks more like a massive spider web than a line. A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign last year used multiple data sources showing the flow of grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed, and processed food items within the country. They found 9.5 million or so points of contact between different U.S. counties. A farmer might grow corn in one location, for instance, ship it to another state for storage, have it transformed into animal feed in a different county, then shipped elsewhere to a feedlot. The animals who eat that feed might be processed in yet another location, and then returned, shrink-wrapped, to grocery stores near the farm where the corn was first harvested.
鈥淔ood flows between counties in the United States鈥� by Xiaowen Lin, Paul J Ruess, Landon Marston, and Megan Konar (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae/meta)
Look globally, and the situation gets even more complicated. The U.S. imports about 15% of its food, including just over half of its fruits and vegetables, and most of the coffee. It exports, in dollar terms, a bit more.
For the most part, this has created a system of plentiful and accessible food. But during this pandemic, some nodes of this supply web have turned into choke points, often because of policy decisions unrelated to agriculture.聽聽
When airlines, for instance, grounded flights, that also meant a slowdown in trade, explains Will Martin, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.聽聽聽
鈥淗alf of the world鈥檚 air freight goes in the bellies of passenger planes,鈥� he says.
When restaurants and schools closed to comply with social distancing orders, markets disappeared for farmers and processors. There are separate chains for the residential market and the 鈥渇ood away from home鈥� market. And although the latter tends to be hyper efficient 鈥� producers can predict, for instance, how many wings American consumers will eat at restaurants during March Madness 鈥� it is also quite difficult to pivot. (When March Madness is canceled, the production chain can鈥檛 just shift to turn that chicken into boneless breasts sold at grocery stores.)
鈥淚t鈥檚 a totally different business model,鈥� says Kathleen Finlay, president of the Glynwood Center for Food and Farming in Hudson, New York. 鈥淚f you are a wholesale farmer, you鈥檙e growing a few crops and you鈥檙e selling a lot of it to a relatively small number of buyers. You don鈥檛 have ads. You don鈥檛 have a website. You don鈥檛 have a way for a person to buy food from you. ... It鈥檚 a totally different back end and production plan.鈥�
Think about eggs, says Jayson Lusk, head of the agricultural economics聽department聽at Purdue University. Some big egg operations only supply restaurants. Others produce only 50-gallon drums of liquid eggs to be used in cafeterias. These operations don鈥檛 have people to grade the eggs or put them in cartons for consumer retail. They can鈥檛 even get cartons because cardboard manufacturers can鈥檛 switch up their operations to make the correct packaging quickly enough. Add to that a rush of consumers baking at home and there is a temporary shortage.聽
鈥淓verybody shows up in the grocery store buying eggs,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he industry wasn鈥檛 able to adapt to that.鈥�
Finding flexibility
Glynwood and other groups,聽including Ms. Hashley鈥檚 New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which guides newcomers to the agricultural sector, have been working with local farmers to figure out how to market directly to consumers. While they don鈥檛 suggest eliminating imports, either from across the world or across the country, they believe that establishing more robust local networks will lead to a more resilient system.
鈥淭he conventional food system that is homogeneous and centralized has vulnerabilities in lots of ways,鈥� Ms. Finlay says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing it right now in meat production and processors.鈥澛�
Last month, some of the country鈥檚 largest meat processing plants, which control most of the meat going into the country鈥檚 food system, stopped operation because of concerns about their workforce and COVID-19. That created not only a shortage of meat throughout the country, but what Professor聽Hayes describes as an 鈥渆levator effect鈥� for hogs coming through the system. With farmers unable to ship their fully grown pigs to the processors, there was no room in their barns for the piglets that they had already contracted months ago to purchase. And so the animals piled up.聽
With such a small number of processors handling such a large percentage of the meat coming through the system, the impact was devastating, says Professor Hayes. Agricultural groups are working with the federal government to help get assistance to livestock farmers, and also ease regulations on smaller producers and processors so that ranchers and farmers can more easily sell directly to consumers.
But longer term, many experts say, there may have to be a debate about whether to bring more automation into animal processing, whether to create less efficient but more flexible processes for production, and how to mitigate the pandemic鈥檚 financial toll on farmers so that agricultural production doesn鈥檛 drop.聽
鈥淲e need to think long and hard about how we support our growers in the United States,鈥� says Professor Malone.
Throughout all of this, Professor Lusk says, it will be important to keep in mind how well the American food system has done 鈥� despite the inability to find those dried chickpeas.聽
鈥淚 think the food system responded remarkably well to this totally unexpected, really abrupt change,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 food. People say, 鈥榃ell, I had to do without my favorite brand a few days.鈥� It just shows how much we take for granted.鈥�
Editor鈥檚 note: As a public service,聽all our coronavirus coverage聽is free. No paywall.
