Coronavirus puts U.S. pork industry in crisis mode with some farmers euthanizing piglets
LA TimesChris Petersen looks at a Berkshire hog in a pen on his farm near Clear Lake, Iowa. “One producer described it to me the other day as a snowball rolling downhill, and every additional disruption that we have just kind of adds to that and how fast and how big it’s going to be when it finally hits,” said Mike Paustian, who farms 2,400 acres of corn and soybeans and sells 28,000 pigs a year near the small eastern Iowa community of Walcott. COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has created problems for all meat producers, but pork farmers have been hit especially hard. Whereas poultry producers can slow production by not hatching baby chicks and ranchers can keep cattle on pastures longer, pork farmers don’t have good options. “We are in crisis and need immediate government intervention to sustain a farm sector essential to the nation’s food supply,” said Howard Roth, a pig farmer from Wauzeka, Wis., who is president of the National Pork Producers Council, an industry trade group.
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