It's PRIME Time!
These are crazy times in Meat Land. I’ve never watched a wilder swing from supply to scarcity to over-supply, and now maybe back to scarcity.
Over many a Zoom call, I’ve had conversations with friends and family about what the hell is going on. Wish I knew….
But as far as I can figure, the short answer is, it’s complicated. The reassuring answer is, Electric City Butcher, and many local butcher shops around the country that partner directly with their farmers, are going to have access to plenty of meat. The long answer is, maybe COVID-19 is teaching us a little more about how reliant our meat industry is on a handful of (freaking huge) buildings in the Midwest. What can you do about it? I’ll get to that later.
The biggest bottleneck in the meat supply these days, is processing. That’s the word we use for slaughtering, portioning, and packaging meat. For 90% of the meat sold in the US, this is done in one of a handful of USDA-inspected facilities somewhere in Nebraska, Minnesota, or Iowa. The shortage isn’t a lack of farmers. There are plenty of cattle, pork, and chicken roaming the country. It’s not because we can’t move the product. There are lots of retailers with armies of trucks to get said animals to a cooler display near you. It’s the step in the middle that is preventing meat from getting out of the pasture and onto the plate.
Why? Like I said, it’s complicated. It’s also heavily regulated. Red Tape Warning to all you Libertarians out there!
First, a quick Capitalism lesson. Industry always wants to move ever faster. Speed = profit. I’ve been a business owner long enough to know that efficiency means more money in my pocket at the end of the day. But unfortunately, there is almost always a slippery slope when it comes to speed; quality and safety often start to slide (you’ve read The Jungle).
Enter the USDA. They’re suppose to balance out industry’s desire to move always faster with the fact that whatever they produce needs to be safe for my belly. So the government inspects all the meat plants daily to pump the brakes and keeps everyone honest. Industry constantly pushed the envelope, and government reigns them in.
But what happens when the regulator and the regulated find something they can both agree upon. Inspections = time. Time = money. Reduce the number of slaughterhouses = fewer inspections = saved time and money for everyone. Fewer plants meant less competition and fewer costs for industry, and fewer boxes to check for the inspectors. Win-Win, Right?
The result was that for many years now, there has been a big push by the big meat processors and USDA inspectors alike to centralize meat plant operations. This has increased the size of each meat packing plant to mammothian proportions and dizzying volumes. If you’ve read The Chain, you realize how quickly these facilities move; sometimes 2,000 animals an hour.
Things just before COVID were so centralized that only four meat companies in the US (JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Smithfield Foods) supplied 90+% of the meat consumed in the US, and almost half of all meat sold overseas (not ECB meat of course). Despite eating more meat today, we have fewer slaughterhouses today than there were 25 years ago.
Animals are being born on farms everyday. If the processor’s doors are closed, say due to a pandemic, the farmer runs out feed and land for his animals pretty quickly. No place to process means the system backs up, sometimes so badly that animals are euthanized, right when some folks are going hungry. Crazy, right?
I know we’re all feeling a bit overwhelmed these days. And yes, it is easier to just continue to watch Netflix, pretend to school our children, and tread water until someone figures this shit out. But if you do have two minutes, you can make a difference in all this nonsense.
There is a bi-partisan piece of legislation before Congress called the PRIME Act. It basically amends some of the Federal restrictions on slaughter, allowing the more than 1,000 state and local abattoirs and slaughterhouses to pick up the slack where the big four are failing. It also will allow for greater variety of animals, more sustainable practices (shorter hauls), and more neighborhood businesses like ours, to flourish.
The folks at Farm and Ranch Freedom have already set up a step by step to #takeaction! Check it out, send a note to your Congress member, and then post it on social media to brag to all your friends.
Ok, let me get off my soapbox.