In Minnesota, 10,000 Pigs Are Euthanized a Day, While Supermarkets Limit Meat Purchases

Say thank you to your local virus Maoist!

The Minnesota agricultural commissioner said 10,000 hogs a day are being euthanized in Minnesota.

With [the crazy response to the] COVID-19 battering food supply chains, 10,000 hogs are being euthanized daily in Minnesota. Millions of healthy chickens also have been killed, and thousands of turkeys are likely to be next, the state’s top agriculture official said Tuesday.

“It’s about as big as an [agricultural] emergency as you can have, and on many fronts,” said Thom Petersen, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

The closures of several Midwest pork-processing plants have left Minnesota farmers — the nation’s third-highest hog producers — with a lot of mature pigs and nowhere to put them.

Nearly 500 JBS workers in Worthington had tested positive for COVID-19 as of Monday, by far the largest workplace outbreak in Minnesota. More than 800 workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at Smithfield. [Workers who are below retirement age and are virtually zero risk.]

Smithfield Foods started reopening its Sioux Falls, S.D., plant Monday, and JBS in Worthington is scheduled to do the same Wednesday.

Both have reinforced worker-safety measures, state and union officials have said.

JBS “will be opening on a very limited capacity,” Petersen said. “They are still at this point assessing workers who are able to come back to work [Wednesday]. Workers who are healthy are anxious to come back.”

Normally, the plant employs around 2,000 on multiple shifts.

But Petersen said he expects there will be one shift with only a “couple of hundred” workers Wednesday.

The JBS plant last Wednesday started to euthanize hogs with a skeleton crew, with no meat processing. While JBS had hoped to kill 13,000 animals daily, it has only been able to do 3,000 per day, Petersen said.

Hog growers do not have to report how many healthy animals are being euthanized.

Petersen said based on reports from growers, that easily 10,000 hogs are being euthanized a day “and it could be much higher.”

Dave Preisler, executive director of the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, said it’s hard to know the exact number of hogs being put down.

“That’s going to be a moving target, but is it significant? Yes. Is it going to be more significant? Yes,” he said. Producers began euthanizing healthy hogs two weeks ago.

Over the past three weeks, “several million” healthy chickens also have been euthanized, though the situation has “stabilized a little” in recent days, Petersen said.

The culprit: a collapse of the fluid egg market sparked by the closure of so many institutional food providers like schools.

Demand for eggs in grocery stores has been high since the beginning of the pandemic.

But much of the egg-production system is built to provide fluid eggs to food-service companies, and retooling farms to provide eggs for retail is neither simple nor quick.

For example, a Cargill Inc. fluid-egg plant in Big Lake temporarily shut down in April and laid off 300 employees there — citing declining demand. The plant processes 800 million eggs annually, sending containers of fluid eggs to food-service companies across North America.

Due to COVID-19 cases among its workers, Jennie-O in the past 10 days has closed three Minnesota turkey-processing plants, two of which slaughter birds. No turkeys have been euthanized so far, but the pipeline is backing up.

“Tens of thousands of birds don’t have a place to go,” Petersen said. He said he expects some of those turkeys will be euthanized.

Minnesota is the nation’s largest turkey-producing state, and Jennie-O — an arm of Austin-based Hormel Foods — is the industry leader. Hormel said in a statement Tuesday that “at this time, we hope to be able to continue to strategically manage our supply chain where [euthanization] won’t be necessary.”

The company said it has been managing the situation through “industry partnerships,” and by diverting birds to its slaughterhouses in Faribault and Barron, Wis.

Source: Star Tribune

11 Comments
  1. M 777 says

    a few people have little more than the common cold and this could lead to starvation! this is a set up… agenda 2030, Georgia Guide stones… they have told us what they want to do… kill us! this is all intentional, based on a tidal wave of constant lies… This is a DEADLY HOAX. I cannot believe how many people fall for it! from the people that have been lying to them all their lives… they believe this one too! starvation might be a necessary wake up call! where I live in Central America (not US) we no longer have many cheeses from the US, or the EU, also many other shelves are bare… thank god we have enough local produce and meats available from what I have seen today

  2. Herkemer Bumbershoots says

    it dont take a rocket scientist open the damn plants back up and stop the efin lying about this cold bug

  3. Mike the human says

    Free the beasts. I need 30-50 feral hogs to justify my recent gun purchases.

  4. Natural_Texan says

    Prices will rise and protein production will be further centralized and monopolized.

    1. sabelmouse says

      yup! and who has stakes in that?!

  5. Wandering Hillbilly says

    Instead of giving the surplus product to food banks or the needy or sell the surplus at a reduced cost they’d rather euthanize the animals, waste the meat and dump the milk and eggs in order to limit supplies so they can keep the price and profits up.

    1. sabelmouse says

      sadly believable 🙁

  6. ke4ram says

    Article will have no effect until people start going hungry as they did in the last great depression where growers/producers done the same thing albeit to hold up prices.

  7. michael houston says

    euthanization…..just another word for SUICIDE….

    1. Jamison says

      When one decides to die, on their own. That is suicide. When others decide to kill off a population, that is genocide.

  8. Starfire says

    Very sad. But the cartoon at the top is funny!

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