Current Cattle Market Daily Headlines for November 25, 2020

americancattlemarkets

5 years ago

Meat packers accelerated spread of Covid-19, study says

Last week, the Academy of Sciences released research linking meatpacking plants to 6 to 8 percent of U.S. Covid-19 cases.
- The study also found that plants are correlated with 3 to 4 percent of Covid-19 deaths through late July.
Authors of the data stated that meatpacking plants act as “transmission vectors” and “accelerate the spread of the virus.”
Researchers found that the risk of excess death mostly came from large meatpacking plants operated by industry giants. Communities that were able to shut slaughterhouses down reduced the spread of the virus.
According to the authors, livestock processing facilities not only pose a health risk to meatpacking companies and their workers, the risk extends throughout the public where the plants are located.
By July 21^st, packing plants were associated with 236,000 to 310,000 Covid-19 cases and 4,300 to 5,200 deaths.
- The majority of these cases were community spread outside of packing plants.
The plants that received waivers from the USDA to increase their production-line speeds had significantly more countywide cases.
The study concluded by saying that public health and robust essential supply chains may require an increase in meatpacking oversight and possibly a shift toward more decentralized, small-scale meat production.

Danielle Beck, NCBA’s director of government affairs, says expanding processing capacity is one of the organization’s top priorities heading into 2021.
Beck stated that NCBA has heard the call from their members for more packing capacity and the organization plans to pursue different opportunities going forward to solve this issue.
There are numerous legislative proposals on the table, and NCBA claims that they have a few in their back pocket that they will be working on in the next Congress.
Additionally, NCBA is looking at various ways to make improvements to the system without having to rely on Congress for help.

Recent research released by the University of Oxford proves that non-meat eaters, specifically vegans, have a higher risk of breaking bones, due to lower intakes of calcium and protein.
The study included 55,000 British people that were grouped into four diet groups composed of 29,380 meat eaters, 8,037 fish eaters, 15,499 vegetarians and 1,982 vegans.
Results of the study over an average of 17.6 years showed 3,941 cases of total fractures. It was concluded that vegans in this study had higher risks of total and some site-specific fractures (hip, leg, vertebra) compared to meat eaters.
- Specifically, those who were fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans had a much higher risk of hip fractures.

As of November 11^th, the USDA has approved more than $10 billion each for CFAP1 and CFAP2.
The top payments for CFAP1 have been made for cattle, corn, milk, hogs and soybeans.
CFAP2 made the most payments to corn, cattle, sales commodities, soybeans and milk.
- Sales commodities include specialty crops, aquaculture, nursery crops and floriculture, and other commodities not included in the price trigger and flat-rate categories.
So far, Iowa farmers have received the most CFAP2 payments at nearly $953 million. Nebraska follows at $688 million, Minnesota with almost $666 million, Illinois with almost $638 million and California with $618 million.