Going Local: The Case For Bringing America’s Meat Supply Closer To Home

Will Harris is at odds with the way most producers get meat to the American public. The Georgia farmer shuns the large production plants that dominate the protein supply chain in the country, raising his “athletes” — hens, pigs and cattle and seven other species — on 3,200 acres near the Alabama border. He raises them holistically, before slaughtering them for meat and selling it to local restaurants, local grocers and home delivery nationwide.

So when he listens to the growing panic about America’s meat supply, he huffs.

“Let me tell you about Tyson,” the 65 year-old head of White Oak Pastures says in a slow drawl. “For the last 25 years, some of us have recognized there is no resilience in the American food system. Consolidation made production very cheap and very efficient, but it took away the resilience.” 

Harris’s business is small, with annual sales of $20 million, a fraction of the $43 billion for Tyson, the country’s largest meat supplier. But his pandemic business is booming, with online sales increasing 5-fold, sending him scrambling to restock more burgers and bacon, while finding ways to prioritize sales to existing customers. 

His protests are part of a growing chorus of local producers who have been calling for a decentralization of food production for decades, believe they are the answer, and are increasingly emboldened amid headlines about coronavirus closures at Tyson, Smithfield and other major producers. Followed by comments from Tyson chairman John Tyson who said the American food supply chain is “breaking” and called on the White House to intervene in the meat industry. Tyson declined to comment.

“There could be and should be two or three White Oak Pastures in every agricultural county in this nation,” says Harris. “Tyson is highly scalable but not highly replicable. [Local production] is highly replicable. It’s not highly scalable.”

To begin with, they charge higher prices, and scaling up to meet broader demand is expensive. Harris wants to build a bigger fulfillment center to handle this new level of volume for online orders, but doing so would require as much as $1.5 million, which in a downturn could mean the end of his family business. For it to pay off he would need to increase and sustain a direct-to-consumer business well above the typical 10% of annual sales he generally does, which would help White Oak offset the business he would lose from longtime restaurant customers.

“When you’re a privately owned business, every time you look at a big investment, you bet the farm,” says Harris, who started transitioning to holistic agriculture practices in 1995, which stores carbon in the soil by raising livestock on pasture and avoiding tilling before planting. “You bet your house and your daughter’s house.”

The U.S. meat production system is set up to help companies like Tyson most, but ranchers and farmers are questioning whether “a fundamental restructuring” is needed, countering Tyson’s plea with one of their own, sending a letter sent to the White House through R-CALF USA, the largest lobbying group representing U.S. cattle ranchers big and small. Decentralization is the key to creating plant efficiency, argues Peter Walter, head of L.E.K. Consulting’s agribusiness practice. The trade off, though, is a tough sell. 

“It’s a better long-term way for the industry to be configured from a food security point of view,” Walter says, agreeing that the change would mean lower profits for big producers. “Virtually all of the processing facilities added in the past 5 years have been very large-scale.” 

The federal government is moving in the opposite direction. Days after Tyson made its public plea for government help, President Trump signed an executive order mandating meat plants stay open by taking on the liability of operating, though some fear this will put workers further at risk. New estimates released Tuesday show that 22 meatpacking plants have closed at some point in the past two months and there have been at least 13 meat plant workers who have died from Covid-19, according to the the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents more than 250,000 meatpacking and food processing employees. 

Still, threats of massive meat shortages are still limited and will likely be localized as weeks go on. Red meat supplies are up 7% from last year and poultry is up 2%, as of the USDA report for March. According to a monthly survey of 800 warehouses across the nation, total beef storage is up 11% from last year, and last month, boneless beef cuts in storage reached an all-time high of close to 500 million pounds, the most tallied since records started in 1960. Leading up to the crisis, there were 50 million pounds of pork loins in storage, also the highest ever counted. 

Some cuts may be harder to get, particularly for pork, which has seen the most issues so far with around 25% of pork production cut, while beef has seen a reduction of 10%. Yet some chicken and pig farmers — large and small  — are having to euthanize their animals as processing time at the major slaughterhouses is cut. Minnesota pork processing capacity is down 100,000 hogs a day, while as many as 40,000 hogs in Iowa, around 40% of the state’s total, are not getting processed daily. Pumped with antibiotics and grain-based feed, the animals are likely to die of obesity and related problems if they aren’t slaughtered soon, or become too fat to fit in the slaughterhouse door. 

Tyson recently secured waivers from the government to speed up the lines at some of its chicken plants even further, despite concerns from worker advocates. Meanwhile, a recent report estimates there could be almost $700 million worth of extra local food available and without a home as farmers markets see declining foot traffic and restaurants limit purchasing in the coming months. 

All of it may be building to at least a crack in the formidable big ag defenses, according to Maria Lettini, executive director of FAIRR, an investor network of $20 trillion in assets under management. 

“Like the financial system of just over a decade ago, the consolidation of meat sector in a few enormous corporations means that they are probably now being seen as ‘too big to fail’,” she says. “Evidence suggests that other options such as a more localized food systems could thrive and deliver the nutrition required if empowered to prosper. Covid-19 is truly a wake up call.”

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