Tyson Foods takes out full-page ad: “The Supply Chain is Breaking”
thehill.com
thehill.com
But the Beyond Meat facility isn't the same miserable hellscape for employees:
>“You can come to our facility anytime,” Brown said in an interview on Tuesday. “Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/no-beyond-burrito-...
Robots tend to be for lower-volume activities.
There is always work been done - for example on delicate fruit there are a host of companies and machines that do things like sorting and even picking. https://www.compacsort.com is a good example.
Robots tend to be for lower-volume: https://www.roboticsplus.co.nz/robotic-apple-packing
But for foods like potatoes the sorting machinery is pretty simple as spuds are easy to handle.
On the farm there are lots of solutions for automating the various process they have. The larger the farm the more is automated.
For example on a dairy farm you'll see milking machines that range from expensive robots (small, European farms) that allow no-touch operation, to inline or rotary milkers that allow decent volume with low/no touch etc.
https://www.waikatomilking.com/products/milking-parlors/rota...
> Tyson said it installed plastic or plexiglass dividers along the cafeteria tables where employees eat lunch. Two employees said the cafeteria dividers probably helped to an extent, but they stressed that the cafeteria is always very crowded.
>The production line worker said the company provided bandanas at one point, but she said her colleagues who utilized them complained they were cheaply made and started fraying right away.
It sounds like they were trying to do something, but it's just really hard to keep ahead of this thing. I think food work is just fundamentally less safe right now.
If this worries you plant a Victory Garden now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
And buy some chickens.
They're right about supply chains falling apart though. If everyone were to switch over to mainly plant based a lot of crop land would likely need to be moved from grain to feed animals to plants to feed humans. Who knows what that would take.
I think the real problem here isn't that we can't get by without meat packing plants. It's that it's been 2 or so generations since the last time a really large of North Americans have had to adjust their diets in response to a major situation like this, and so we don't know what to expect, and the most psychologically available stories to look to are ones of actual famines.
Virtually all of our problems with the meat supply are self-created and can be fixed — lets just return to the horror show we had 30 or so years ago... wait - it was just fine 30 years ago, and someone who ate the same meat he sold you was responsible for raising and preparing your food.
Source: family owned and run feedlot, and worked at a local abattoir thru university.
Still, growing crops to feed to cows to feed to people is an inefficient path to getting calories to people. Grow people crops, skip the cows.
Consider edible beets and sugar beets. Sugar beets are technically edible but many people would find the experience of eating them to be unpleasant, since they were not bred to be edible by humans.
I love vegetables, but seasoning them so that the taste is not bland requires more work and skill.
Seasoning vegetarian dishes isn't all that difficult once you dedicate yourself to learning. You'll often need to look to non-European/American recipes though. I was lucky that I grew up in a household with a North African parent where I learned a lot about seasoning just by osmosis (even if they aren't veg, there were lots of vegetarian dishes). My partner is South Asian and there's obviously a long, rich history of vegetarian cuisine there. It's worth learning!
Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption.
What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption.
TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.
[1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produ...
Don't forget to tell your neighbors to stop using pesticides on their lawns. Per acre, Americans use 10x the amount on lawns as agriculture.
This is not universally agreed, and sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."
Well, what is? I mean flat-earthers don't agree the world is round, should we take their objections seriously?
> sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."
Except how am I Marie Antoinette?
I'm just trying to look on the bright side.
It sucks that those birds are going to live and die and go to waste. It sucks that the people working there are out of work. It sucks that the company is losing money. All of that sucks.
The best you can say is, well, it's a good excuse to try to eat healthier.
FWIW, my sister roasted two chickens just the other day and they were delicious. So don't think I'm not feeling the pain here. (Is little joke. Trying to end on upbeat note here. Work with me.)
On the other hand, the nutcases, back up by the meat industry, say present meat consumption rates are just fine.
That's around $500 per person. Is this monthly or yearly? If it's yearly it's a negligible amount of money.
What's the motive for a full-page ad? Is it just "Don't blame us, we're doing all we can?" I don't know, but this seems unnecessarily alarmist for a PR exercise.
millions of animals [...] will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities
There will be limited supply [...] until we are able to reopen
will waive the waiting period for short-term disability to allow workers who get sick to immediately be paid
The company told CNN plants are sanitized daily [...] the company performs daily temperature checks
In short, "Let us reopen!" I don't have an opinion on whether they should reopen or not, it just seems pretty clear that's the unspoken message.
We need to re-open our food infrastructure ASAP.
This is really risky for workers, yes, they'll be exposing themselves to the virus. So let's double or triple the pay for the workers involved due to the hazards. Add generous survivors' pensions for the families of those who die or become disabled from COVID-19, as some certainly will if we send them into factories while the risks are there.
Maybe we need a program to shuffle unemployed people who have already had COVID-19 into high-exposure jobs like meat plants. Or send in the troops and man the plants with military personnel. We need somebody to produce food even during a pandemic. Getting those food plants open before we run out of food needs to be a top priority!
Is keeping meat processing plants closed really going to cause food shortages? Eating rice and beans isn't pleasant, but comparing it to starvation is hyperbolic.
Not to mention you're also assuming that rice and beans are unaffected... but very little if anything about these plant closures are specifically related to them being animal protein sources. Does no good to shrug and say "people should just be eating vegetarian anyhow" if the vegetarian supply line is also going to collapse.
Rice and beans is probably not the best example, it's just the stereotypical frugal food. What's more realistic would be corn and soybeans. Massive amounts of corn is used for ethanol production (which we probably don't need since oil is at an all time low), and massive amounts of soybeans is used for meat production (which we don't need because all the meat processing plants are shut down).
Can you elaborate on that? It's not like you're eating leaves. Aren't all types of corn mostly starch that humans can digest?
> Although not grown primarily for human consumption, people do pick ears of field corn when its sugar content has peaked and cook it on the cob or eat it raw. Ears of field corn picked and consumed in this manner are commonly called "roasting ears" due to the most commonly used method of cooking them.
So: Only in a brief window? Maybe, though I doubt it. (Unless you're trying to say that, in the form of corn on the cob, it won't keep for all that long, which is true.) With commercial processing? Hardly. (Unless you are trying to say that we can't, say, can it or freeze it in quantity without commercial processing, which is true.)
All that said, people would happily eat field corn on the cob if it meant that they got to eat. It may not be the whole answer to a food shortage, but it's an answer that could help a significant amount.
Sweet corn is (usually) picked by hand on a much smaller scale, left in its natural leafy husk, and transported for retail sale within a week or two.
It's a whole different ball game. I'm sure we COULD take big portions of our feed/fuel field corn and grind it into human-ready cornmeal for mush and cornbread, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park :-/
For better or worse, meat is considered an essential food. It would be disastrously, apocalyptically bad if it becomes unavailable.
Crisis has to be met with adjustment. This a pandemic, so don't just expect things to be normal. Things will have to change, whether that is where we source our food, how it is brought to us or even what we eat... something will have to change.
That's not how it works at global scale. If chicken isn't available, there isn't necessarily anything else to pick up the slack. There certainly won't be if other supply chains break too because we neglect them all, one-by-one, thinking something else can just pick up the slack.
Food is a necessity. It's arguably the only necessity being truly threatened by our reaction. It means that, if necessary, the "adjustment" that should be made is that people may be pressed into work by government force if necessary to keep it flowing. Anybody who is necessary, not just "plant workers". (Most likely starting with the National Guard and the military, if necessary.)
Food supply chain breakdowns are not an inconvenience. They are an existential threat, and csense is completely correct; it is 100% a greater existential threat than the pandemic, if it gets going. In fact, the pandemic isn't even an existential threat on the same scale; the absolute worst case possibilities anyone ever posited for the coronavirus are still childs play next to civilization-scale food shortage.
Now, I do not personally have a good bead on how big this threat is right now. There's a world of difference between Farmer Bob had to dump a few thousand gallons of milk and saw a chance to turn it into a photo op and/or blame some other problem he had on the coronavirus, and entire months' worth of production going down the drain across the industry. I do not have a good bead on whether this is a drummed-up talking point or a legit crisis. However, it is important that we find out for real, because if there is a real problem here, it can rapidly dwarf the coronavirus itself.
That is the essence of much blue collar / immigrant labor. You sacrifice yourself so that your broader family will be better off.
This is beyond hyperbolic. Coronavirus is actually happening. Not having any food isn't, and we're not anywhere close to that point yet, either. If anything, the big food problem right now is that it's piling up in warehouses because we can no longer rely so much on restaurants to buy it up and then throw half of it into the trash anymore.
It sucks for Tyson that they can't make their products without bringing humans into too close a contact with each other. But I'm pretty sure that the lines that processes beans and rice doesn't need quite so much direct human involvement, so, as long as the virus doesn't learn how to infect inanimate objects, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to keep eating.
If you need to massively increase the amount of beans in the supply chain, you'll need someone to plant them first and so on.
Yes, it takes 3-5 months to bring rice to harvest, assuming you have a suitable climate for growing it in the first place (which most of the United States does not).
Beans are more forgiving with respect to climate, but they also take 3-4 months to grow.
And, as you say, you can't suddenly turn a meat packing and distribution operation into one for rice. They're different in almost every respect.
Further, the food (and other inventory) piling up in warehouses is itself a major problem because it drives up storage costs beyond what those owning the inventory can pay, and those companies go bankrupt. We can sustain some bankruptcy in our supply chains, but at a certain point, it becomes unstable and it cascades.
Everything is interconnected.
I saw that in the article and just shook my head. Those animals die whether the processing plant is opened or closed.
The article could have phrased it better, but instead chose a very hollow appeal to emotions over accuracy.
Once the pipeline empties, it takes months to fill back up, because animals take months to grow to marketable size.
Edit: to expand a bit, most meat animals are raised by a supply chain of specialized farms. Some specialize in breeding and birthing them, some specialize in raising them to marketable size (these are called "feeder" operations), and finally they go to a slaughterhouse/processing operation.
If the slaughterhouse stops buying animals from the feeder operation, the feeder operation has to kill them and waste them. Now the feeder isn't buying feeder-sized animals, so the breeder has to slaughter and waste them. Now the supply chain is completely empty.
When the processor opens back up after a few months, that doesn't magically cause market-sized animals to appear, waiting to be turned into meat. The breeder will have to breed more animals and wait weeks to months for those animals to be born. Then the feeder will have to feed them for weeks to months to reach marketable size. Only then can they go to the processor to be slaughtered and sent to consumers.
So, yeah, if the supply chain empties out, it is a Bad Thing.
tldr: hope you like corn and wheat!
- Cover for raising prices
- Cover for unpopular people practices they may (or will) be implementing that will leak and trying to get in front of the bad press
- PR support for the GOP push to get people back to work
- Cover for outbreaks or contamination that may hit the press
I am not talking about groceries here; huge numbers of industries are intertwined. plastics, electronics, transportation, steel manufacturing, etc.
I’m seeing similar issues with electronics manufacturing chains from doing hardware design. It’s getting harder and harder to source parts, and you can see inventories dropping in real time as people buy out parts they need to keep running. I’ve heard rumors of factories at 10% capacity, and other rumors of half the factories they work with completely offline.
Then there’s shipping. Much of the low cost of air shipping was due to cargo space in passenger flight. With so little passenger flights, shipping is expensive. This is likely further causing supply chain headaches for a lot of manufacturing for anyone relying on cheap overnight parts to avoid disruption.
I'm not sure 100% cynicism is warranted in all circumstances.
Occam's razor: Tyson's business is at risk of serious losses because of supply chain disruptions. To try and get ahead of the problem, they put their message out to the public, including lawmakers, who may otherwise be unaware.
https://www.rollcall.com/2020/04/17/as-workers-face-virus-ri...
I'm not sure if I'm serious about imposing that requirement, but it does beg the question of what type of health and safety measures are in place in meat packing plants for the consumer buying the meat _and_ the workers doing the packing.
People have a frightful loyalty to the first version of a story they hear. They know that and they're buying it. It's actually a fairly responsible move because the media could go anywhere with the first take on a story like this.
As for what they want, I'm guessing reduced inspections (so the inspectors aren't traveling between plants, potentially spreading the virus), some government money, maybe a law to limit liability if workers get sick, priority with testing and PPE, and maybe immigration enforcement relief.
Part of the reason I would do such a thing is to have something to point at if / when things do fall apart.
As others have said, there is a severe lack of understanding among the populace about how much effort is involved in getting a product from raw materials to store shelves.
They need to be made aware or the response will be "why didn't anyone tell us?". People don't just go looking for that kind of knowledge.
What the government can do is (1) find and prioritize personal protective equipment for food processing and (2) do a better job on enabling mass testing, again prioritizing the food supply chain.
Lobbying the government is more powerful when backed up with the popular pressure that will come from this ad and associated media coverage.
It’s a relatively generous interpretation, and I’m not commenting on the wisdom of it or what it seeks to induce, but it seems plausible to me.
https://twitter.com/repthomasmassie/status/12547777465274204...
Where is discussion about workplace safety and sick leave? The coronaplague keeps spreading because employees cannot afford to take time off.
For that matter, it wouldn't surprise me were there a traditional term to use. 'Cull,' maybe?
Let businesses set their policies, employees choose their desired level of safety. Let us choose our destinies instead of confining us to quarters.