That’s the title of a new paper co-authored with Joe Cooper, Vincent Breneman, Meilin Ma, Josh Maples, and Shawn Arita that was just published in Food Policy. Here’s the abstract:
“This paper quantifies the impact of the COVID-19 disruption on U.S. meatpacking production. We employ a confidential plant-level meatpacking plant data set from USDA that gives daily livestock (cattle, swine, broilers) slaughter by individual firms and their individual plants. We found a larger underutilization rate of processing capacity for larger-sized beef and pork plants during the peak of plant slowdowns in April-May 2020, while no such relationship was found for broiler plants. In our panel analysis of beef packing plants, we found that higher COVID-19 infection rates in a county were associated with greater plant disruptions, but that plants appear to have been able to adjust relatively quickly to these disruptions. Our empirical analysis suggests a beef plant distribution with fewer large plants could have meant smaller shocks to production during the initial surge of COVID-19 disruptions. However, beef plant size was significantly less important to maximizing utilization of processing capacity after the initial surge.”
The cool aspect of this paper was that we have access (via our USDA co-authors) to previously unexplored confidential micro-level data on plant-level production during the COVID-19 disruptions.