I was recently asked about my thoughts on the New Markets Bill, the RAMP Up Act, and the PRIME Act: legislative initiatives to increase the number of small meat and poultry processors.

The coronavirus pandemic reveals the downside of relying on a handful of mega-producers for most of our nation’s meat and poultry. The mega-producers are extremely efficient at producing massive volumes of economical product of acceptable quality, but their logistical systems are fragile. Their inability to deliver the products to the consuming public during the pandemic has left many people asking why small meat and poultry processors have not stepped in a fill the void in the marketplace.

The simple answer is, “They don’t exist.”

The Americans who produce meat and poultry products, and the Americans who consume those products, are largely in different states. The marketplace is interstate commerce. Preparing meat and poultry products for interstate commerce requires inspection services provided by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

Obtaining inspection services requires a grant of inspection that, once issued, obligates FSIS to provide inspection services to the holder of the grant. Providing inspection services requires manpower: FSIS employees to perform inspection. Therein lies the rub. FSIS does not have enough inspectors to perform the inspection. Why? Two basic reasons.

No. 1 is location. I grew up in a town of about 50,000 population. In the 1960s there were three large livestock slaughter and processing businesses in town. Those businesses have long since closed, out-competed by the mega-producers who moved their operations to rural areas where land and labor is cheaper. Most Americans live in urban environments. Most inspection jobs are in rural environments. Urban Americans simply do not move to rural America in search of employment.

No. 2 is the job: My children and grandchildren are millennials and Gen-Z. Their economic opportunities are in the private sector: clean, air-conditioned offices and laboratories with cappuccino machines and background music. A public sector job on a slaughter line, where it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and so noisy that hearing protection is mandatory, is simply unattractive.

If you are an FSIS manager or senior executive, you are going to maintain a Small Plant Help Desk, offer Small and Very Small Plant Outreach, and conduct a webinar titled "USDA Assistance for Small Scale Meat Processing." You appear helpful and it is easy to hire employees for these administrative jobs in urban office buildings. You are not going encourage applications for federal inspection from small business owners when you lack the manpower to provide to obligatory inspection service. For those small business owners who do apply, you make the application process difficult and discouraging.

How do you fix this problem? Legislation. The New Markets Bill, the RAMP Up Act, and the PRIME Act create paths to opportunity. They do not remove the obstacle in the path. To access the opportunity requires a federal grant of inspection, which requires manpower FSIS does not have. That path is mostly closed. You need legislation that addresses the manpower problem. How can Congress do that?

Modernize the way FSIS performs inspection — particularly postmortem inspection, which has changed little in the past 50 years. We can put men on the moon and engineer white blood cells to fight cancer; surely, we can find a way to perform inspection with less manpower.
Revise 9 CFR, Chapter III, Subchapter A. Many of these regulations have their foundations firmly planted in the Bureau of Animal Industry, the federal agency that implemented the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Too much time is wasted enforcing duplicitous, outdated 20^th century rules on a 21^st century industry.
Incentivize state governments to operate State inspection programs. More locally sustainable, locally sourced meat and poultry products is a public good. Small business owners will have to work out the economic realities in their local economies.
- State inspection programs are “at least equal to” the federal program. Every state should have a program that operates under a Cooperative Interstate Shipment Agreement so state- inspected product can move in interstate commerce. If governors want to refuse entry of product from another state, that is an issue for that governor to work out. State-inspected product should not move in export markets.
- States without a livestock or poultry industry large enough to support a state inspection program should be able to contract for inspection services from neighboring states with inspection programs or enter into joint programs with neighboring states.

Leverage the Talmidge-Aiken Act, which allows state inspectors to perform inspection in federal establishments. It is easier for Nebraska to hire a Nebraska resident for a job in rural Nebraska than it is for FSIS to hire a Mississippi resident for a job in Montana. FSIS reimburses states for the inspection cost but maintains control over training and performance of inspection.

For what it’s worth, those are my thoughts. What are yours?

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