REGIONAL—This year has been one of continuous ups and downs for pork producers in Iowa, in large part due to the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s why Drew Mogler, public policy director for the Iowa Pork Producers Association, said marketplace certainty is the No. 1 thing producers are hoping for in 2021.
Mogler, whose family owns and operates Pig Hill sow facility near Alvord, noted the industry’s particular importance in N’West Iowa.
“You look at Sioux County, over 4,000 jobs are created directly by the pork industry,” Mogler said.
“It generates almost $300 million in household income. It’s a huge market for corn and soybeans in that area, which gives a huge advantage to those producers who are raising corn, soybeans to be able to add value to those crops.”
In Lyon County, the pork industry accounts for about 1,400 jobs and generates more than $143 million in household income. Sioux and Lyon counties also are the top two counties in the state in terms of the number of hog farms: Sioux County has 391 and Lyon County has 221.
Mogler spoke about the turbulence the coronavirus pandemic created in the pork industry this year and its ongoing reverberations.
“In April and May, as we started seeing some of our pork processing plants and meat processing plants all across the country really started getting impacted by this pandemic, that’s when we started seeing some really big ripples onto the pig farm,” Mogler said.
The problem the temporary packing plant closures created for producers was they did not have a place to market the animals. That meant keeping them on the farm longer than originally planned and finding ways to keep their growth in check.
“At one point, at the height of it, Iowa State University estimated that over 600,000 animals were backed up on farms across Iowa,” Mogler said. “We were really worried that if farmers didn’t have a place to market those animals, they would have to, unfortunately, euthanize and dispose of those animals.”
He noted that, fortunately, widespread pig disposal did not have to take place across the state as hog farmers were able to halt their animals’ growth while processing plants were in limbo.
On the other hand, the large reserve of pigs in supply created price volatility for producers looking to sell their animals in a market that could not handle the usual influx of hogs.
“Then when we look on the demand side of things, we had restaurants and food service companies shutting down or restricting their business, and so then what do we do with this pork?” Mogler said. “We saw the volatility at the grocery store and the shortages in the meat case in some aspects.”
Since more people tended to stay home throughout the pandemic rather than go out to eat, pork processing also shifted to meet a demand geared more toward grocery stores than toward restaurants or other food-service businesses.
“That’s not necessarily a switch that you can just flip, that takes weeks for a facility to totally rework their lines to be able to service a different type of customer,” Mogler said.
Well before the coronavirus pandemic began disrupting life in the United States, an outbreak of African swine fever in China began in August 2018 and has since decimated the Asian country’s hog supply.
The disease also has been identified in other Asian countries, as well as South Africa, Belgium and most recently in Germany.
Mogler noted those disruptions have created an opportunity for U.S. pork producers to increase their exports this year.
For instance, he said the United States sold 17 percent more pork on a volume basis and 18 percent more pork on a value basis January-August compared to that time frame in 2019.
At the same time, producers in the United States have been vigilant about guarding against an outbreak of the swine fever at home. That would not just impact producers’ ability to export but would ripple throughout the economy.
“That would be devastating to producers,” Mogler said. “Not only to livestock producers but also to folks growing crops, to the folks working in the processing plants, the folks working at feed mills, the veterinarians. A lot of mainstream businesses in these rural communities rely on the livestock industry.”
The Link LonkNovember 05, 2020 at 06:00AM
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