For decades, five U.S. pork plants have been operating at higher line speeds safely producing pork products. Losing 2.5% of U.S. packing capacity this summer because of a procedural issue has created many challenges for the pork supply chain.
USDA’s recent decision to allow the nine plants that adopted the 2019 New Swine Inspection System (NSIS) to apply for a one-year trial program to use faster line speeds has garnered a lot of praise from the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the industry as a whole.
“Now it’s open to all nine plants that are in the NSIS program at this time, and not every plant may be able to do it based on where they are and the number of employees or hogs in the area. But if it’s just those six that go back up, we could recover everything that we lost in July, which would be huge,” Andrew Bailey, NPPC science and technology legal counsel, told AgriTalk’s Chip Flory on Tuesday.
In the midst of tight packing supply and tight harvest capacity, Bailey said this could be the immediate-term help the industry needs now.
“USDA taking this action is a big deal,” Bailey said. “The actual impact of that was on July 1, 2.5% percent of harvest capacity in the U.S. for pork disappeared. And that’s a huge deal for producers, especially producers that live in an area where maybe your only plant is one of these plants that was operating at higher line speeds.”
In some areas, where packers are few and far in between, producers had to begin shipping hogs further away to be harvested. Bailey said some estimates were almost $10 a head, just to ship the animals further to a different processing plant.
USDA made a smart move to develop this program, Bailey said.
“In theory, if a plant is in the NSIS, because that’s really the requirement here, and you meet these criteria, any plant could operate at these higher line speeds,” he told Flory. “Not every NSIS plant could do it, but we’re really hopeful that that’s what this does – permanently memorializes that program.”
More from Farm Journal’s PORK:
NPPC Praises USDA’s Decision to Allow Faster Line Speeds
The Reality of Slower Line Speeds
Line Speed Ruling: It’s Time to Stick to the Science
Who Will Pay the Cost of Reduced Line Speeds in Pork Plants?
