It wasn’t all that long ago when the term “sustainability” would prompt a look of befuddlement (huh?) on the faces of folks at meat industry conferences. Better yet, I recall that outright laughter ensued when C. Larry Pope, former CEO of Smithfield Foods, announced at a National Meat Association meeting in 2010 that the company named a chief sustainability officer.

Smithfield, and other major industry players, didn’t necessarily have the best of reputations when it came to stewardship of the planet, which is what most consumers then — and now — identify with the term or concept of “sustainability.”

The people componenet of sustainability isn’t a new concept to the meat industry, one that has involved important areas like worker safety. And we’re seeing companies now tap into their social consciences with efforts in DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion. It was only a month ago that Smithfield, for example, named its first female plant manager (Andrea Tucker) at the company’s Tar Heel, N.C., pork plant.

Surely, it’s become crystal clear in recent years that the definition of “sustainability” must include people, particularly during an era in which tight labor is a formidable hurdle to running packing plants efficiently. As of April, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the nation’s unemployment rate was 3.6%.

What is more understated, though, is that the people that companies need must have decent and affordable homes to live in, along with the investments in local downtowns, schools, sports fields and libraries that have come to the fore with initiatives like JBS USA’s Hometown Strong. That program has invested more than $100 million across the country.

We know of varying efforts across the industry to address the issue of housing availability and affordable, including through rental arrangements or subsidies. But it’s going to take even more of an investment in the current inflationary environment. As noted in a recent analysis by Ron Plain, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri, the cost of living in April was 8.3% higher than last year, the second biggest year-over-year increase in 40 years.

And it’s especially a cost of doing business in rural America.

That’s where, as the National Rural Housing Association (NRHA) notes, median income remains — all these years since the Great Recession — 20% below that of urban households, and more than 15% of all rural counties in the country are persistently poor, with at least 20% of the population living in poverty for more than the last 30 years. It’s there, too, where there is a disproportionate amount of occupied substandard housing; 21% of the nation’s inventory is in rural and small communities, according to U.S. Census data cited by the Housing Assistance Council.

Investment in rural housing has been on the decline for years. The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2018 that “fewer homes are being built per household than almost any other time in U.S. history, and it is even worse in rural areas,” with NHRA pointing out that a lack of jobs isn’t a threat to economic growth as much as a lack of housing is.

And so, the definition of “sustainability,” it appears, needs an addition.

To build on ‘sustainability’

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