Expert Matthew Wadiak explains why our food chain is so fragile, and how we’ve incentivized the wrong qualities in big agriculture for the last seventy years
Could you give us the context of the business? Where is it? How many people and what you do?Our business is we have a 860-acre farm down in Decatur, Arkansas, and that’s a breeding facility where we breed heritage line birds only. And we have a bird, that’s over the course of the last 10 years, developed and been selected for flavor, for health, for having a better immune system. Then we have a farming network.
And that’s led to breeds of pork and poultry animals specifically that dominate the entire food system, that have very low immune systems, that grow really quickly; and that if you had to, for example, shut a plant down for two weeks, those animals can’t survive for that time period, for those couple of weeks.
And obviously the reason is you need a stable workforce in the country. And more than anything, I feel like, if you’re a big company out there right now, and you’re buying really cheap meat, and you’re trying to bid one company against another for five cents to drive the price down, you’re affecting these workers and these farmers more than anything.
And again, nobody’s immune to this. We’ve had people who have had like a cousin or something who knew they were sick, and we’ve just proactively told them to stay home for two weeks just to make sure they didn’t have it. And I think that’s, what’s kept it out of our facility to date. So I think that’s a really good solution. Like in small plants you can develop social solutions that are reasonable and fair to the employees and also keep people fed. And I think all of that’s really important.So longterm, what should consumers expect? Should they expect meat shortages at the grocery store or takeout restaurants they’re going to? Or is this going to be a temporary blip?I wish I had a crystal ball. I don’t think people should freak out, for one.
And that’s been actually nice to see. We’ve seen on the consumer end of things, more thoughtful buying and more consideration towards, like for example, our chicken is a lot higher in attribute. It’s pasture-raised heirloom chicken, which is not something you see everywhere. And the velocity of that overall has been positive in that consumers are picking things that are better quality. And I’ve heard that across supply chain generally speaking.
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