Before trucker Kevin Steichen could drop off hogs Tuesday night at a Tennessee processing facility, he had to be tested with a laser thermometer on his forehead.
“As far as being concerned, I’d be lying to say I wasn’t a little bit,” Mr. Steichen said during a stop Wednesday in Missouri. “But I’m doing my job, and we continue to do our jobs.”
Concern about the food supply chain has grown during the coronavirus pandemic, with reports of meatpacking plants shuttering due to sick workers, dairy farmers dumping millions of gallons daily because school cafeterias are closed, and grocery stores apologizing for higher prices and empty shelves.
Consumers and workers have expressed anger and confusion over the weak links in the supply chain.
“There are a number of cracks in our system that this [pandemic] is highlighting,” said Tim LaSalle, a researcher and adjunct agriculture professor at California State University, Chico. “Take Chicago, for example. It’s surrounded by four, large agriculture states, but it gets less than 10% of its food from there … That puts it at risk with regard to something with transportation.”
At Sahrside Dairy just outside of Bricelyn, Minnesota, Mark Sahr says he must send milk from his 1,500 cows to a storage site hours away in South Dakota — just a couple of years after a tough period of low dairy prices.
“The plant can’t take anymore,” said Mr. Sahr, who has been in the dairy industry since 1995.
Most of the dairy produced in the region is manufactured into cheese, he said. But as schools shut, lowering the demand for milk, suppliers and farmers are scrambling to find new customers.
Mr. Sahr said he hasn’t dumped any milk in Minnesota, as some dairy farmers have in Wisconsin, but he said he understands the pressures to pour it down the drain.
“Their markets have been cut off and they only have so much space to store products,” he said.
In an interview Monday on CNN, former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack highlighted the multisource dilemma in the nation’s food supply.
“It’s a cascading series of events here that’s really disrupting the entire food chain,” said Mr. Vilsack, who served in the Obama administration. “You start ending school lunch programs, universities shut down, food service shut down, tourism, hotels have low occupancy … at the end of the day, you’ve basically got a tremendous amount of the overall supply of food having to be redirected.”
News reports have noted car lines outside food banks near Pittsburgh and San Antonio, Texas, while the CEO of Smithfield Foods, a top meats producer, said this week the country is “perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.”
Many observers say the problem is not a lack of food but the access to markets as COVID-19 sickens and strains front line workers.
Last weekend, a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that processes up to 5% of the nation’s pork, closed as hundreds of workers had confirmed cases of COVID-19. As of Wednesday, it was a coronavirus hot spot, with nearly 700 linked cases and federal health official arriving to examine the facility.
“All those pigs need to have a place to go,” said Trent Loos, a pork producer from Hazard, Nebraska. “Pork producers in North Carolina are going to feel the same hit.”
Meanwhile, panic buying has emptied shelves of specific foods at grocery stores across the country. Bread, milk, apples, eggs, ground turkey and beef have been stockpiled and hoarded by some anxious consumers.
Last week, Ellie Taylor of the Alabama Grocers Association posted a video to social media telling customers to avoid panic buying.
“Take what you need, but please leave some for your neighbor,” Ms. Taylor said as she walked through a grocery store. “There’s not a problem with the food supply. Please do not stockpile.”
And the danger of infection remains for grocery workers at the end of the supply chain. The U.S. Department of Agriculture applauded the “patriotism” of those workers during the pandemic in a statement to The Washington Times.
“The food supply chain is a critical industry in the United States and Secretary [Sonny] Perdue fully recognizes the need to keep workers and inspectors safe during the COVID-19 national emergency,” a USDA spokesperson said Wednesday.
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