Everywhere that we examine capitalist regimes, we can see, from macroeconomic policies to the shape and weight of doors and the design of office chairs, a refusal of work mixed in with the overriding obsession with work that is the birthmark of capitalism. In fact, the very logic of capital requires this antinomy. That is why the annals of contemporary capitalism are still written in “letters” of blood and fire and why this will be so until its blessed end.
— GEORGE CAFFENTZIS (2013)
Regeneration Midwest, an organization of farmers and food activists across the twelve U.S. Midwest states, held a webinar on COVID-19 and rural America. My presentation, with slides, was dedicated to setting the stage for a broader discussion around what regenerative agriculture could do to alleviate the worst of the outbreak’s impacts short-term and long. The text has been both updated from a PReP Rural presentation six weeks later and expanded in its descriptions of the impact on the meatpacking sector.
COVID-19 IS NOW truly a global pandemic.
It’s hitting countries Global North and South, although still filling out in South America and Africa, in this, likely, only the first wave of infections.153 Despite recent declines in media capitals in the United States and Europe, the outbreak is ramping up at the global level, now clocking in at 100,000 new infections a day.154 There are already cases of COVID documented even among indigenous groups in deepest Amazonia.155
In the United States, some rural counties are now coming in at incidences per 100,000 population that rival New York State, what began as the country’s primary epicenter. The rural phase took off this month. We see here on this map the worst time series of reported cases post-May 3, in purple, concentrated in the Midwest.156
“The novel coronavirus arrived in an Indiana farm town mid-planting season and took root faster than the fields of seed corn, infecting hundreds and killing dozens,” Reis Thebault and Abigail Hauslohner begin their report on rural COVID:
It tore through a pork processing plant and spread outward in a desolate stretch of the Oklahoma Panhandle. And in Colorado’s sparsely populated eastern plains, the virus erupted in a nursing home and a pair of factories, burning through the crowded quarters of immigrant workers and a vulnerable elderly population…
In these areas, where 60 million Americans live, populations are poorer, older and more prone to health problems such as diabetes and obesity than those of urban areas. They include immigrants and the undocumented—the “essential” workers who have kept the country’s sprawling food industry running, but who rarely have the luxury of taking time off for illness.157
How did this incursion into rural America come about?
To start, as among countries, there is great variation in how states responded to the outbreak. This county map is colored by the date at which stay-at-home orders were announced.158 The darker the color, the earlier the order. And we can see that several states, including in the Midwest, never issued such orders at all. Sheltering in place is no replacement for mass testing, personal protective equipment, and hospital capacity, but no sheltering assures tens of thousands in demonstrably preventable infections.159 In the other direction now, some states are reopening more quickly than others. A subset is beginning to lift those orders—for a few economic sectors to start, others the entire state, producing the COVID resurgences models of early reopening predicted.160
Why else the variation in local dynamics? Some of the largest meatpacking plants—there in the red dots—are serving as COVID incubators across state, meat type, and company: hog, beef, chicken, JBS, Hormel, Tyson, and Smithfield.161 According to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, as of June 8, there have been at least 23,500 reported COVID cases directly connected to meatpacking plants in at least 232 plants in 33 states and 86 reported deaths in 37 of those plants.162
EWG reports that counties with or near meat-processing facilities host an average COVID-19 infection rate twice the national average.163 That’s a rate that’s held steady even when changes in work protocol were implemented after President Trump ordered meat processors reopened in May.164 From these plants, COVID spreads not only to local communities, but beyond county lines, and by contagion eventually out beyond the commuting range of each plant.
Why meatpacking plants?
While the U.S. outbreak began in big cities on the coasts and was largely driven by the air travel network, the rural outbreak is likely networked by its vast food commodity trade.165 The two maps here show food tons shipped in 2012 by Freight Analysis Framework area at the top and by individual county on the bottom.166 So, as Megan Konar and colleagues describe, a shipment of corn might start at a farm in Illinois, travels to a grain elevator in Iowa before heading to a feedlot in Kansas, and then in animal products sent to grocery stores in Chicago.167 However mechanized the value chain, there are people interacting with each other all along the way. Food commodities are the means by which even the most isolated county can be linked into global epidemiologies.
And we can see the same more specifically for the hog shipments meatpackers tackle. Erin Gorsich’s team mapped out a large sample of swine shipments in the United States for 2010 and 2011 based on Interstate Certificates of Veterinary Inspection for seven major hog states in 2010 with Nebraska added in 2011, together representing 63 percent of U.S. production.168 The maps here show shipments out, shipments in, and between counties (for the eight states outlined in blue). So, we see large and frequent shipments into and out of these hog centers. At the same time, at the county level, shipment networks are defined by low reciprocity, transitivity, and assortativity. That is, there is a lot of asymmetry in how hog counties are interconnected.
Gorsich’s team concludes that the results “are consistent with a vertically integrated domestic swine industry in which large numbers of animals are shipped to the Midwestern states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota for feeding and slaughter.”169 The researchers conclude that those hubs with the greatest traffic in and out should be targeted for surveillance for such livestock diseases as porcine epidemic diarrhea virus and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. But in a surprise, we suddenly have a virus pinging back and forth this way directly human-to-human.
By what mechanisms is the virus spreading within meatpacking plants? What makes them so infectious? Workers, in effect, are treated as much as sides of beef as the animals they’re tasked to process, even, or especially, with an outbreak underway. Workers at the Tyson plant in Black Hawk County, Iowa,
were still crowded together on the factory floor, in the cafeteria and in the locker room, and most did not wear masks. Tyson said it offered cloth bandannas to workers who asked, but by the time it tried to buy protective gear, supplies were scarce.
At least one employee vomited while working on the production line, and several left the facility with soaring temperatures, according to a worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job and local advocates who have spoken with workers at the plant….
On the night of April 12, she said, nearly two dozen Tyson employees were admitted to the emergency room at a hospital, MercyOne….
One worker who died had taken Tylenol before entering the plant to lower her temperature enough to pass the screening, afraid that missing work would mean forgoing a bonus, said a person who knows the worker’s family and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.170
There is a political ergonomics to a meatpacking plant that—as reported from Upton Sinclair to Nick Kotz to Ted Genoways—has long pushed off the dangers of the plant and its throughput upon workers as just another price of doing business.171 Worker safety and health aren’t a priority when appearances matter more than the disease itself:
Rafael Benjamin, 64, who worked at Cargill Inc.’s pork and beef processing plant in Hazleton, Pa., told his children on March 27 that a supervisor had instructed him to take off a face mask at work because it was causing unnecessary anxiety among other employees.
On April 4, Benjamin called in sick with a cough and a fever before being taken to the hospital in an ambulance a few days later. He spent his 17th work anniversary at Cargill on a ventilator in the intensive care unit and died on April 19.172
Certainly Trump’s use of the Defense Production Act to send workers back into these active hotspots is clear as a bell on the point.173 As are the CDC and OSHA’s entirely voluntary COVID guidelines, which now recommend quarantine only when infected line workers are symptomatic.174 Under the guise of an emergency the administration has also repeatedly framed as “fake news,” the USDA allowed poultry plant lines to speed up to rates that require workers to bunch closer together, not farther apart.175 The Labor Department “all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to COVID-19.”176 The pandemic offers the kind of moment in disaster capitalism that Trump is using to follow through on his promise to dismantle regulations neoliberalism missed.
But it isn’t just the White House’s fault. States are locking out meat-packers from unemployment insurance to force them back to the plants.177 Some county health officials, protecting companies, have been documented refusing to share with plant workers how many coworkers have become sick under the guise of “protecting privacy.”178 Other health officials have been frustrated by confusion over which agencies regulate meatpacking operations—the USDA, the state, or local officials—a confusion over which the companies are taking full advantage.179
Agribusiness itself is tightening the screws. Tyson reverted to its pre-coronavirus absentee policy, offering short-term disability only after workers get sick with what is increasingly recognized as a chronic condition.180 The Mountaire Corporation illegally charged poultry line workers for PPE and cancelled its dollar-an-hour hazard pay.181 “Social distancing,” Smithfield Foods’ CEO Kenneth Sullivan lobbied Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, “is a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops.”182
The structure of the industry past and future implies the epidemiological neglect is more than a matter of expedient disregard.183 Companies warn that plans in motion to automate these plants, an ecomodernist wet dream, are likely to increase the price of meat:
The first robot takes X-rays and a CT scan of the carcass, which generate a 3D model of its shape and size. Based on what the system sees in the model, another bot drives rotary knives between the ribs and cuts through the hanging carcass, using the spinal cord as a reference point.184
That is, Big Meat admits it has long balanced its profits atop the cheapest labor possible for some of the country’s most dangerous work. Peeking ahead, with all those workers no longer necessary, we also infer the next stage in depopulating rural communities.185
COVID is meanwhile moving backwards to the front of the supply chain, starting, these early days, to infect large numbers of workers albeit on only a few farms so far, but with three million seasonal workers still crowded together field-to-field and vulnerable to infection.186
Elizabeth Royte reports that more than a third of COVID cases in Monterey County in California were diagnosed in farmworkers.187 At one farm in Tennessee, all 197 migrant employees tested positive, although only three displayed symptoms. In Yakima County in Washington State, 500 cases were reported among agricultural workers.188 Even when employers respond with handwashing stations, masks, increased social distancing, and temperature checks, the virus continues, as if the problems aren’t a matter of individual intervention but systemic, embedded in the business model itself.
The impact of the pandemic was felt at this end of food production long before the virus entered the farm gate. The White House moved to alleviate pressure on the ag sector by proposing to lower the already pittance pay for migrant workers.189
Meatpacking and farmwork, whose labor discipline and compensation are holdovers from days of slavery, are treated so shabbily in part because they are dependent upon Black, Latino, and immigrant labor.190 The demographics are imprinted upon the resulting COVID incidences.191 Even before COVID, the greater the Latino workforce—particularly in food production and warehouses, now COVID hotspots—the more numerous the injuries logged and the fewer the inspections.192
The demographics explain in part why, in a gesture of casual racism, an august Wisconsin chief justice, ruling in favor of reopening, dismissed the risks of the outbreak as failing to threaten “regular folks.”193 At the highest level of governance, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar floated blame for the meatpacking deaths on dirty immigrants bringing COVID into the plants, one of a number of novel (and yet very old) contributions to American race science:
Those infections, he said, were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives rather than the conditions inside the facilities, alarming some on the call who interpreted his remarks as faulting workers for the outbreaks….
In a Fox News interview back in April, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem explained a massive outbreak at a Smithfield pork-packing facility like this: “We believe that 99 percent of what’s going on today wasn’t happening inside the facility. It was more at home where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus because a lot of these folks that work at this plant live in the same community, the same building, sometimes in the same apartment.” In an interview with Buzzfeed, a Smithfield spokesperson expanded on this theory. Citing the plant’s “large immigrant population,” she explained that “living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family.” 194
Shameless white supremacy in gowns and business suits, offloading blame for the conditions it produced in factory and neighborhood alike. Agribusiness trucked immigrants into these conditions through the H-2A, H-2B, and EB-3 guest worker programs.
In July, Forward Latino and other worker advocacy groups filed a civil rights complaint with the USDA, alleging racial discrimination on the part of meatpacking companies.195 As Tyson and JBS took millions in federal COVID aid, the companies are subject to federal civil rights law. A CDC report found 87 percent of COVID-19 cases have occurred in minority meatpackers even as they make up 61 percent of the workforce.196 With the sector’s unionism of the business variety, any pushback is laudable. One wonders if such a legal strategy also risks a Dred Scott decision against plant workers in contrast to the bottom-up impacts of the protests against George Floyd’s murder that helped inspire the complaint to begin with. As geographers Carrie Freshour and Brian Williams ask, can we better draw on models of resistance from radical traditions openly opposed to the totality of racial capitalism?197
Other factors influence rural outcomes. Ag isn’t the only source of infection, for one. With the collapse of the town economy, many rural communities turned to another trade in flesh. State and private prisons are major sources of revenue and income.198 Here the New York Times maps U.S. prison populations and their weekly traffic inbound.199 We see large prison populations in cities, but clearly some rural counties rival their urban counterparts. Prisons are linked to six of the top twenty-five rural county COVID outbreaks. Close living quarters sicken largely Black and brown inmates transferred across county lines prison-to-prison, as well as prison guards, like meat-packers, moving from prison to community and back.
Comorbidities—other health dangers—and environmental exposures can make COVID outcomes worse.200 Particulate matter in the air is proving to be one, with an increase of 1 microgram per meter-cubed in particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers and less associated with an 8 percent increase in the COVID death rate.201 Christopher Tessum and his group mapped U.S. mortality pre-COVID associated with pollution of PM2.5 by locale, economic sector, product, and demographics.202 We see most of food’s contributions emerge out of agriculture—from Iowa, Illinois, the rest of the Midwest, and California’s Central Valley—but also commercial cooking and industrial production. Uncharacteristically, compared to other sectors, whites bear the greatest absolute brunt in ag, but Black populations carry a greater load per capita, with Latinos not far behind.
Where are rural COVID patients to go once sick? A failure to access emergency and critical care is also proving a COVID comorbidity. We see many rural counties across the country with hospitals without ICU beds or with no hospitals at all.203 The North Dakota map shows most counties without a ventilator or no more than a couple.204
Big picture, many rural counties represent the bleeding edge of the United States’ recent decline in life expectancy.205 With political consequences. Along the bottom axis of the graph is an index of health metrics around what are called diseases of despair, including obesity, diabetes, heavy drinking, lack of physical exercise, and life expectancy for 2010–2012.206 The more you go to the left, the worse the index. Up and down on the y-axis are the changes in a county’s votes for Obama 2012 to Trump 2016. And we see many Midwest states, suffering the worst in public health markers of social abandonment, undertaking the greatest leaps in switching votes from Obama to Trump.
I’m a partisan of neither political party, but clearly economics, health, and the political landscape are fundamentally integrated.
We can see these factors interacting together in real time during COVID. In Louisa County in Iowa, south of Cedar Rapids, an outbreak began at the Tyson plant in Columbus Junction, killing two employees, before spreading out to the rest of the county marking Louisa with a per 100,000 infection rate that rivals New York State—with the plant now reopened.207 Louisa County does not have a hospital, nor a single practicing physician living in the county. As part of a pattern of deception, the state, pursuing a pro-industry public health plan, lied about the seriousness of the initial outbreak at the Tyson plant, reporting 221 employees infected, even as it also had data weeks in hand showing 522 infected.208 It also reported 444 cases at a Waterloo plant nearby, even as county officials reported more than a thousand.
The Brazil-incorporated JBS hog plant in Worthington, Minnesota, suffered an outbreak that spread out into surrounding Nobles County, now counting nearly 1,600 confirmed cases in a population of 21,629.209 In the face of evidence that plants were generally more susceptible, JBS kept its line full-tilt through 21,000 hog a day with cases already accumulating among plant workers:
Van-loads of workers commuted from Sioux Falls [in South Dakota] every day, some of them apparently sick. Employees skipped shifts out of illness or fear. Dozens of workers staged a walkout over lunch to demand that the company slow production lines. The plant’s head of human resources abruptly resigned….
In interviews with a dozen meatpacking workers and their spouses last week in Worthington, several themes emerged. They believe the company downplayed the threat of the virus. They say its spread was accelerated by employees commuting from Sioux Falls in JBS-provided transportation. And JBS policies on COVID-19 sick pay and returning to work are applied unevenly, with many fearing that sick people are still going to work.
Maria Echeverria, who works on the second shift and has been at the plant for five years, said managers insisted for days that only one employee was sick with COVID-19, even while it was clear to the workers that more than 30 had it.210
Upon closing up in the face of the outbreak, JBS kept Minnesota Department of Labor inspectors out of the plant, a refusal rarely undertaken, suggesting there was something to hide.
The plant may be opening back up to euthanize 200,000 hogs grown too large now without the processing capacity or market to match such a just-in-time supply. “Excess” hog grown out fast and furiously on ractopamine hydrochloride across the country are being gassed, drowned, shot, and, outside the JBS plant, in canonical Minnesota fashion, mulched through a wood chipper.211 Iowa Select Farms is steaming its hogs alive:
Under [ventilation shutdown], pigs at the company’s rural Grundy County facility are being “depopulated,” using the industry’s jargon, by sealing off all airways to their barns and inserting steam into them, intensifying the heat and humidity inside and leaving them to die overnight. Most pigs—though not all—die after hours of suffering from a combination of being suffocated and roasted to death. The recordings obtained by The Intercept include audio of the piercing cries of pigs as they succumb. The recordings also show that some pigs manage to survive the ordeal—but, on the morning after, Iowa Select dispatches armed workers to enter the barn to survey the mound of pig corpses for any lingering signs of life, and then use their bolt guns to extinguish any survivors….
The deployment of armed workers to shoot any pigs who are clinging to life in the morning is designed to ensure 100 percent mortality. But the number of pigs in the barn is so great that standard methods to confirm death, such as pulse-checking, are not performed, making it quite possible that some pigs survived the ventilator shutdown, were not killed by bolt guns, and are therefore buried alive or crushed by the bulldozers that haul away the corpses.212
Consolidation, price fixing, and divided supply lines—food service vs. groceries—build in an inflexibility. These hogs (and milk and other food commodities) can’t just be redirected to another market or to charity to feed millions of Americans lining up at food pantries in hours-long caravans during the ongoing economic collapse.213
So now we can get a better handle on our COVID distribution, shown here just for U.S. rural counties (which may miss the point that urban and rural are in fact integrated systems).214 In textbook fashion, New York, into which nearly all outbreaks typically get sucked in before being blown back out to the rest of the country, ignited outbreaks in other cities, including Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans.
But the food commodity circuit also began to spread the virus up and down the value chain, leading to some of the worst outbreaks, culminating in operations in which workers are stacked together as so many sides of beef. The back-to-work order the federal administration is imposing may temporally alleviate the 25 percent drop-off in meat production the food system built in, but only at the expense of more line workers getting sick. Even with sufficient PPE, spaced-apart work stations, and a slowed down line, workers will likely continue to get sick, degrading agribusiness’s capacity to deliver.
Will America starve? Probably not, although millions, including in rural counties, go hungry even in the best of times from the very policies Big Ag washes through charity work with food banks.215 But as with the H5N2 outbreak in 2015, a pathogen is shaking a business model that had long damaged rural areas to its core.216
A worse possibility is that the model is under no attack at all. The disease’s very danger may have offered the industry a way out of its own trap. We’ve now learned that the Defense Production Act intervention Trump pursued for meatpacking (but not for PPE production) aimed at protecting Big Hog’s access to a bullish China market that lost half its domestic pig supply last year to African swine fever:
Smithfield Foods was the first company to warn in April that the coronavirus pandemic was pushing the United States “perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.” Tyson Foods also sounded the alarm, saying that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from the nation’s supply chain as plants were being forced to close because of outbreaks.
That same month, Smithfield sent China 9,170 tons of pork, one of its highest monthly export totals to that market in the past three years. Tyson exported 1,289 tons of pork to China, the most since January 2017.
In all, a record amount of the pork produced in the United States—129,000 tons—was exported to China in April.217
Even with U.S. hog consumption flat since the early 1980s, the sector has recently built out a major expansion—million-square-foot plants and added work shifts—leading to a record 12 percent increase in output 2017–2019. “The producers need exports,” the New York Times quoted Dennis Smith, a livestock analyst at Archer Financial Services.218
We needn’t accept any of the nationalist huff implied here to object to the real aim of sending Black, Latino, and immigrant meatpackers into COVID’s line of fire: to protect Big Meat’s monstrous profits at the expense of the domestic welfare the back-to-work order claimed to protect.
Is there another way? Can what until now has largely been only the hopes and dreams of regenerative agriculture, an alternate mode of production, be turned into a pragmatic transition out of the damage-as-usual? COVID has initiated baby steps, primarily around the sector’s logistics.
The Practical Farmers of Iowa have held weekly conference calls on how to run smallholder operations in a time of COVID.219 Carolyn Betz, one of the researchers for Regeneration Midwest’s Health and Climate Solutions research project, attended one of these meetings, reporting back that farmers are working to make both food production and the sales themselves COVID-safe. Farmers are devising modifications to their business practices: for instance, dropbox payments, drop-off Community Supported Agriculture boxes, curbside deliveries, punch cards instead of cash, no-return boxes, and drive-through menu orders.220
But how to scale out to match the growing consumer interest in the face of choked off market access? How to escape getting caught in the wreck of industrial production? Some pasture livestock is still beholden to industrial processing. Do we need to purchase a fleet of mobile meat trucks or rebuild regional abattoirs staffed by retrained meatpackers?221 Do U.S. smallholders need to finally start populating the Open Food Network app that farmers across Australia use to the regenerators’ great advantage, including during the present pandemic?222
Can we get states and cities to subsidize both the supply and demand ends with price supports for rural farmers and food vouchers for urban consumers, making locally grown foods available to all?223 Are we ready, finally, to more concretely regionalize supply lines to feed the country in such a way as to prevent diseases in the first place and still feed people when pathogens and other shocks do arise?
—REGENERATION MIDWEST, APRIL 29, 2020
PREP RURAL, JUNE 9, 2020