April 2020 will be a month everyone will remember. The COVID-19 pandemic has everyone — including my household of five females — working, learning and socializing in different ways. And if the stress of not being able to connect with friends and family as we normally do isn’t enough, the girls and I left our home in Eastern Iowa to move a few hours to the west. For us, it will be particularly memorable.

Why did we move now, of all times? Well, when we started the process in January, we had no idea what would transpire in this first quarter of 2020. We put things into motion that couldn’t be stopped, and now we are in this odd state of limbo. The girls are in between school districts due to closings and, ironically, I am still working from home — only now, I’m just nine miles from the office we moved nearer to in order for me to work there in person.

When pig farmers were breeding sows nine months ago, they also had no idea how much the world would change in the months following. They had no clue the pork supply chain would be disrupted, due to both the overnight seismic shift in protein buying patterns and processing plants closing to protect the health of plant workers.

I took a Swine Science class many years ago at Oklahoma State, and virtually the only thing I remember about it was developing a “pig flow.” At the time, I was a clueless young woman who had grown up around small pig farms in Iowa. The idea that it was necessary to work out a systematic flow to make sure that barn space was optimized and animal welfare was preserved was a foreign concept that I struggled with. It seemed impossible to line everything up so that all pigs had the proper space for the right length of time. And if they didn’t grow according to the standard assumptions … well, forget about it!

Fast forward to mid-April 2020, and our industry is facing the real-life version of this exercise right now, with a level of disruption we would have never contemplated in that class so many years ago. Thousands of pigs scheduled for harvest this week have no shackle space to hold them. The younger pigs that would have taken their place in the finishing barn are stuck in farrowing or nursery barns, depending on the system.

Producers can get by for a few weeks. Just like humans can reduce the amount of food we are eating to maintain our weight, farmers can adjust diets to make sure that pigs don’t get too big for our traditional harvest processes. We can double stock barns with baby pigs for a period of time, so they can be moved out of the farrowing barn or nursery for the pigs that are coming behind them.

Despite the best efforts of our producers though, temporary homes for livestock are a short-term solution. We must find ways as an industry to harvest those pigs that have reached market weight as soon as possible. Pork producers are counting on it. And consumers, whether looking to stretch their food dollars or relying on food banks during a period of economic uncertainty, are counting on us to provide lean protein to feed America.

Finding solutions in a time of supply chain disruption

Join for free* to continue reading.