Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed a Defense Production Act to keep the country’s beef, pork and poultry processing plants open during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With some processing plants temporarily closing due to various outbreaks, Rippey farmer and hog producer Pete Bardole says it’s been stressful for the hog industry during the pandemic because there is a process for how the industry needs to run.

“There’s a certain time, they come into your barns, you feed them, and then they’ve got to go out, (and) you can’t wait for them to get out. So if there’s no place for them to go to be processed, they just can’t stay longer. Corn we can store in a bin and we can hold it for a long time. When you’re raising livestock, when they meet the market weight criteria they’ve got to be harvested at that point. It’s worrisome on being able to get them out in time for the next group of pigs to come in.”

Bardole points out that in spite of COVID-19, he’s trying to keep raising hogs as normal as possible. 

“But then you think through the process of everything that’s got to happen and it makes everything tight.”

Bardole adds COVID-19 has certainly impacted logistics of where to take pigs and how to get them to processing plants.