CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating to the pork producing industry in Illinois, affecting everyone from pig farmers to the people who work in meat-processing plants.
According to Jenny Jackson, spokeswoman for the Illinois Pork Producers, the pork industry is getting hit in a couple of different directions by the coronavirus pandemic. She said there's no shortage of food, but a "disruption" in the food supply chain.
Jackson said food service sales of pork are down 65 percent, because schools are closed and restaurants are not open for dine-in service. And, not as much pork is being processed, because so many pork processing plant workers are off-work with COVID-19.
"They have as much hogs as they have as enough labor to harvest right now, so it’s a matter of getting more healthy people back to work, because that’s why they’re moving so slow. They have less people at work. They’re slowing down the line speeds," Jackson said.
And because fewer pork processing plant workers are on-the-job, the three major pork processing plants in Illinois are buying fewer hogs, because they can't process as many as they could with a full workforce. As a result, Jackson said hundreds of thousands of pigs in Illinois are becoming unmarketable. There's no place to put them.
"Pigs grow really fast. They’re full grown at six months. They grow about a pound and a half to two pounds a day. Every day that they’re waiting to go to market, they’re still growing. And packers can only take up to a certain weight for their standards and their rail capacity at their packing plant," she said.
And because pigs are born every day, Jackson said, those hogs that have grown older and bigger are unmarketable and are euthanized. She said it's the last thing a hog farmer wants to do. She said farmers work so hard to feed and raise pigs and are losing hogs at $70 a head.
Just this week, it was reported that Illinois' five Republican congressmen wrote to Governor JB Pritzker asking him to ask FEMA for federal funds for Illinois' pork industry. The congressmen said some of that money would go for the safe disposal of hundreds of thousands of pigs.
Jackson said that since 2008, Illinois Pork Producers has had a program called Pork Power which supplies pork to food banks in Illinois. She said some unmarketable hogs are donated by farmers and money donations to the association go towards processing the pigs in order to supply the food banks.
Jackson said Illinois is the fourth largest pork producing state in the country with sales of more than 11-million pigs a year.