Tyson announced today that it has suspended operations at its Columbus Junction, IA pork plant. The closure is COVID-19 related for worker health protection after several contracted the virus. The plant has a capacity of about 10,000 head per day. Last week, total slaughter was 2.565 million head; assuming a five-and-a-half-day week, the plant represents about 2 percent of last week’s kill. Hogs are being sent to other Tysons facilities. This, of course, is the packer who has been through the drill before as last year’s fire at the Garden City, KS beef plant shut down operations and scrambled slaughter and packing operations to other plants. No word on how long the plant will be idle. National Beef has suspended it...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.