“Let’s hope that USDA has an alternate plan,” says Ohio farmer and chairman of rural Voices USA Chris Gibbs during AgriTalk’s Friday Free-for-all discussion on the recent pork plant line speed ruling.
Gibbs, along with Pro Farmer policy analyst Jim Wiesemeyer, RealAgriculture’s Shaun Haney and AgriTalk host Chip Flory, discussed USDA’s decision not to seek to overturn a court ruling ordering pork packing plants to operate at slower line speeds.
“It’s the Democratic party’s belief that they don’t want faster line speeds, but it’s going to have an impact on processing runs,” Wiesemeyer said.
Iowa State University Economist Dermot Hayes conservatively estimates that the court ruling will cause a reduction in federal pork harvest capacity of 2.5%. Specific regions will experience significantly higher reduction in capacity. Producers surrounding the six NSIS plants operating at line speeds of above 1,106 hogs will be most negatively impacted. The NSIS plants will suffer from capacity reductions of 20% to 25%, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) shared in a statement on Thursday.
“This is really a bipolar argument here,” Gibbs said. “Because if we move over real quickly to the beef industry, one of the reasons we have these this dichotomy in margins between the feeder and the packer is because of lower output of the packer. They were slow during COVID, etc. Then we come around, and we want to do the same thing to swine processors, maybe to a smaller degree, but we want to slow that down.”
The result is going be a higher cost to the consumer, Gibbs added.
Wiesemeyer noted that packers don’t raise their bids because they can’t get the workers and they can’t get the production.
“This just proves, once again, of the fragility of our food supply chain. I hope in these hearings, that we talk about the fragility of our supply chain and if the consumer and everyone is willing to expand capacity, because capacity costs money,” Gibbs said. “The reason we have this very efficient system is because it’s profitable, it’s efficient, all the trains run on time. It’s like an assembly line, a white car comes down and a white door comes alongside.”
There is another side to this story, Wiesemeyer added, that gets into worker safety.
“We need Vilsack on the line to say why they did what they did, why they’re not appealing,” Wiesemeyer said. “I do think we ought to err on both sides on this one.”
Flory argued that when you look at the safety records of the plants that were operating, or are operating with the faster line speeds, worker safety has not been an issue.
“The ruling was not made due to evidence of a threat to worker safety – of which there is none,” NPPC said in a statement. “The origins of the increased line speeds allowed under the New Swine Inspection System (NSIS) are found in rulemaking progressing through the Clinton, Obama and Trump administrations. The rule, formulated at the staff level, has no partisan history and its legal challenge was based on an alleged omission violating the Administrative Procedures Act.”
More from Farm Journal’s PORK:
USDA Will Not Appeal Line Speed Ruling in Pork Processing Plants
Line Speed Ruling Will Drastically Reduce Pork Harvest Capacity in Some Regions
Misguided Ruling Could Upend the Lives of Many Hog Farmers, Sorenson Says
