U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety Mindy Brashears praised the country’s meat and poultry processing industry for its resilience in returning to production at levels almost on par with where they were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brashears spoke during the recent podcast, Food Safety During the Coronavirus, hosted by the USDA and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.
When the pandemic hit the United States, workers at meat and poultry plants across the country were infected, leading to worker absenteeism and prompting many facilities to suspend operations.
But with processing plants being deemed essential businesses by the federal government, and disruptions to processing capacities leaving many farmers struggling to find facilities to have their livestock and poultry processed, keeping the plants offline was not a viable option.
USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which Brashears oversees, worked with processors, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well as state and local health agencies, to get the disrupted plants running again. That was no easy task, but everyone rose to the challenge, Brashears said.
“First and foremost, we want to feed the American public, but we had to keep our workers safe,” Brashears said. “We were dealing with an unprecedented situation, so we had to have frequent discussions to determine what the needs were as far as situations where we had sick employees, how to bring them back safely, and we were able to come to terms – and this wasn’t even cross-government at the federal level, this was at cross-government at the state and local levels -- and come together with decisions to reopen these plants.”
Brashears said there were some days when processing capacity was limited that were very difficult, but the industry did a good job of bouncing back.
“We came back quickly and we came back safely,” she said.
Brashears said that she has personally visited many of the facilities that had either paused operations or greatly reduced production levels, and they are “up and going at a much higher rate.”
She noted that meat and poultry plants have “many mitigation strategies in place,” such as barriers between work stations, face masks and face shields are being worn, hand-washing is a high priority, sanitation procedures have been heightened, and the air in the plants is being cleaned.
“They are not seeing the illnesses like they were,” she said.
FSIS inspectors working at the plants have also been following the same biosecurity practices, and during the pandemic, no plants have had to halt operations due to ill or absent on-site FSIS inspectors, Brashears noted.
“The industry is taking it seriously, and it has made a dramatic effect on the spread of this pathogen. I’m very proud of this industry and proud of the way they reacted so quickly to keep workers safe and to keep food on the table,” she said.
Also speaking during the podcast was Frank Yiannas, deputy commissioner for food safety and response of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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