Shane Odegaard, Lake Preston, S.D., has three semi-loads of finished hogs — about 540 head — set to go to the Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls for processing this week.

But Smithfield plant shut down over the weekend due to an outbreak of COVID-19 among its line workers.

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If Odegaard, a farrow to finish operator and vice-president of the South Dakota Pork producers Council, can’t find another plant that will buy and process his family’s hogs, he’ll probably have to euthanize and dispose of them. Continuing to feed the animals — even a maintenance diet — would be costly. And if the animals put on more weight, they will be discounted so significantly that it wouldn't be worth transporting them to market. If the plant doesn’t reopen quickly, more animals may have to be euthanized.

“It is going to be a big hit for us,” Odegaard says.

The impact will be widespread, too. More than 500 farm families in South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa supply Smithfield with hogs.

Back online

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Monday at her daily press conference that the state was working with Smithfield to be get the plant back online as soon as it was “appropriate for public health reasons.”

When the Smithfield closed, 238 people out the plant’s workforce of 3,700 had tested positive for the coronavirus. At the time, there were 430 cases of COVID-19 in Minnehaha County where the Smithfield plant is located and 790 cases statewide.

Smithfield had announced a three-day shutdown for cleaning, then the mayor of Sioux Falls and the governor of South Dakota asked for a two-week shutdown to quarantine the workforce. In response, Smithfield announced the next day an indefinite shutdown and said it was installing equipment and physical barriers to help protect employees.

Shutdown impact

If the plant must remain closed it will have a “severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals,” according to a statement from Kenneth M. Sullivan, president and chief executive officer for Smithfield.

The nation’s food supply may also be threatened. Smithfield produces about 4% to 5% of the pork in the U.S., supplying nearly 130 million servings of food per week, or about 18 million servings per day.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” he said. “It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running.”

Sullivan said he believes it is Smithfield’s obligation to help feed the U.S., now more than ever.

“We have a stark choice as a nation — we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19,” he said.