One side of agriculture that was hurt dramatically by the pandemic was the meatpacking industry across the nation. But, according to the University of California – Davis, the economic impact was significantly higher than assumed. Researchers found that there were about 334,000 COVID-19 cases linked to meatpacking plants, which ended up costing the U.S. $11.2 billion in economic damage.
The lead author of the study, Tina Saitone theorizes that the true amount of damages could be higher because it’s tricky to figure out an exact amount of cases tied to meatpacking plants since the numbers are figured out on a county level. “There’s going to be instances where a meatpacking plant employee works in County X, but lives and does their shopping and their community type activities in County Y,” Saitone said. This makes it hard to find the exact numbers without estimating.
Some experts have suggested that the industry moves to smaller plants in hopes to enforce employee safety, but that could be very costly. “The current system has developed to operate very efficiently and provide animal-based protein to consumers at a relatively reasonable price, so, if we moved to a smaller scale more geographically dispersed system, we’re actually going to be adding costs back into the meat packing sector which has evolved to eliminate them,” Saitone explained.
Another suggestion was to focus a little more on automation and bringing technology into the plants. For example, Saitone shared how COVID-19 cases in poultry plants were lower than those at beef and pork processing plants. Although she can’t confirm it, her theory is that one of the reasons cases were lower in poultry plants is because they use more technology than the others. “We suspect that the smaller more homogeneous structure, physically, of broilers that allow those plants to utilize more atomization and technology, allowed that sector to be more resilient and incorporate kind of social distancing and other protocols that limit the spread of COVID,” Saitone mentioned.
