Fears of a national food shortage have circulated since the coronavirus secured a foothold in the U.S. and sparked initial panic shopping, which emptied grocery store shelves. And now, with a growing number of industrial meat processing plants shuttering as workers become infected, and grocery stores limiting meat purchases, those fears have resurfaced.
Experts say, though, that the threat is not a national food shortage but rather a fundamental breakdown of the intricate supply chain system that gets food onto people’s tables. The virus and the widespread shutdowns it prompted have spurred a domino effect of volatile conditions that could have a long-term impact on the agriculture industry, product choices and food prices.
Patrick Stover, the vice chancellor and dean of agriculture and life sciences at Texas A&M AgriLife, said myriad factors are affecting the food supply chain, the first of which is a shift in consumer demand.
“There is no food shortage," he said. “There is plenty of food, but what we’re seeing is because of the public health measures that have been undertaken, there has been a change in consumer behavior in terms of food choice.”
With restaurants closed, consumers’ grocery shopping habits have changed, and “that has disrupted some of the supply chain in terms of moving various commodities from production to consumption,” Stover added.
Although shoppers are buying more groceries than before, they’re not consuming the same kinds of food at home as they do at restaurants. And with restaurants closed or operating at a fraction of their regular capacity, many ingredients have nowhere to go.
“In Texas, one of the hardest hit sectors is the specialty crops sector,” Stover said. “Just in March, they’ve seen a 20% to 50% reduction in sales. They ultimately could lose $400 million. That’s just an example where the food distribution system and the food consumption patterns that occurred two months ago are now very, very different from what we’re seeing today.”
A recent study from AgriLife found that specialty crop farmers in the Rio Grande Valley have seen a 10% to 15% increase in their sales to grocers, but with 40% of their produce usually going to restaurants, they’re still left with a large deficit.
On top of that, the winter growing season in the Rio Grande Valley produced above-average yields, which means there’s even more product with nowhere to go.
Many small-scale local farmers who normally supply to chefs are trying to adapt and convert their models for retail sales. For Jeff Bednar of Profound Microfarms in Lucas, that means letting his micro crops of Swiss chard, lettuce and mustard greens grow to full size and doing away with the majority of the 150 varieties of rare culinary herbs and greens he produced for restaurants.
“We ended up culling about 75% to 80% of our crops,” Bednar said. “We had a couple of restaurant customers that were still open, so we basically ended up giving them tens of thousands of dollars of produce. And we’ve been ripping up all of our edible flowers and rare herbs that retail customers don’t even know what they are or know how to use them.”
Bednar is also behind Profound Foods, a North Texas food delivery system that connects a network of small local farmers directly to restaurants. Before the virus, Profound Foods supplied 130 restaurants, but that plummeted to just four restaurants in the span of a week when dining rooms closed in March.
He pivoted Profound Foods to serve retail customers instead, and gross revenue has since doubled. Now over 90% of the food hub’s sales come from consumers who are purchasing their food directly from local farmers instead of grocery stores.
He believes this is a result of shoppers seeing prices and selections change on their grocery store shelves as a result of the strained industrial food system.
“There’s a huge outcry of people looking for more local food and realizing that you can’t always depend on the grocery store to have something," Bednar said. "And we knew this, the people we work with knew this, and that’s why we do what we do. But I think a lot of people just blindly go to the grocery store and don’t pay attention to things. And now all of the sudden they have to.”
Stover said while the challenges in the produce sector are market driven, the meat industry is up against its own slew of issues.
On the industrial level, meat processing plants are closing due to workers getting sick, which means fewer animals can be slaughtered and processed at a time. That is affecting the availability of products and prices.
“On the livestock side, the issue there is there is a beginning of a bottleneck through the processing plants,” he said. “Animals now aren’t able to move through the system. So what you’re seeing then is the ranchers have to make decisions in terms of feeding them longer than normally they would, which increases costs for them.”
Rather than there being a shortage of meat as some people fear, there are actually more animals ready for slaughter than can be processed and sold, Stover said.
The issue is similar for small-scale farmers such as Thomas Locke in Allens Chapel in Fannin County. An increase in consumer demand means that the slaughterhouses they use are maxed out on production.
“Business has never been better. We’ve been getting requests for meat from people I’ve never seen before at the farmer’s market. And people are buying more at the farmers market when they come,” said Locke, who runs his family’s farm, Bois D’Arc Meat Co.
He sells his pasture-raised pork, beef, chicken and eggs at the Dallas Farmers Market and has already sold out of the supply he had allocated for the next several months.
“For cattle it takes a couple of years at least to plan for an increase in demand, and so we’re still working on the same number of animals that we planned to sell this year. We’re just selling it a lot faster than we otherwise would have,” Locke said.
But because other local farmers are facing the same increase in sales that he is, he said the slaughterhouse he uses is at capacity and can’t process animals fast enough to meet all of the demand. If his local slaughterhouse were to shut down because of infected employees, he said it would in turn shut his farm down.
Judith McGeary, executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance based in Cameron in east central Texas, believes the pandemic has unveiled the weaknesses of a food system that is dominated by a handful of large industrial producers and reliant on a complicated distribution system.
“The system has been designed to maximize profits. It has not been designed for any flexibility in the face of a crisis. That’s been known for quite some time,” McGeary said. “The biggest impact may be an awakening to how unreliable and insecure our food system is and there are changes that can be made.”
She said the key change would be for the government to allow small farmers to use custom slaughterhouses, which are currently permitted only for use by people who are consuming the meat themselves, not marketing it to sell. Doing this would give local farmers and ranchers the ability to increase production and create a system in which the nation’s meat supply isn’t so dependent on the large plants that are shutting down right now, she said.
Stover said in the short term, shoppers will see the strains on the food supply chain manifest through higher prices and more limited options in grocery stores, which will even out in time. But it’s the possible long-term impact that has him worried.
“My biggest concern is that we maintain the robust agricultural system we have. Our producers are hurting. They live off of very small margins, and we don’t want our agriculture system to be lost and have bankruptcies across the entire system because that will be hard to rebuild,” he said.
If things continue the way they are and farmers go out of business, the nation’s food supply could be affected. Federal aid for growers and farmers will continue to be crucial to prevent that, Stover said, and so too will the public’s understanding of the intricacies of the system that supplies their food.
“Consumers now are learning more about the food and agricultural system and appreciating that system more than ever before because we take so many things for granted,” he said. “What I hope we come away with is that people understand where their food comes from and do everything that they can to support their local farmers and the whole global agricultural enterprise.”
