Two of the more interesting courses I did at varsity involved Operations Management and at that time the West was only just starting to come to terms with the Japanese Kanban system in factory processing – often called the Toyota system because it was invented by an engineer working for them.

While it’s just one way of doing Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing, we dealt with it primarily because our lecturer had obtained his PhD in that specific subset of the techniques.

Since then of course it has become ubiquitous around the world, together with its cousin, lean manufacturing, which was coined literally as we were studying the Kanban methods. There has also been the usual plethora of consultants trying to coin it by making slight changes and applying a different name to the process.

One of the biggest impacts of JIT systems was that factories would no longer have to keep an inventory of parts for building things, or at least only a very small inventory. This produced huge cost savings; no longer were huge warehouses for parts needed; no worries about the parts or materials deteriorating while waiting to be used; forcing efficiency on the entire production line because there was no longer “slack” in the system. Every material and component arrived “just-in-time” to be used.

And the system has been applied far beyond the world of factories making cars and other machines. You can apply the method to almost anything – including food production.

Which is where our latest crisis comes crashing into the picture, courtesy of the CEO of Tyson Foods, one of the largest food producers in the USA:

“The food supply chain is breaking,” John Tyson wrote in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. 

“There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” he wrote in the advertisement, which was also published as a blog post on the company’s website.

But because those factories employ JIT systems there are kickbacks all the way up the production chain to the farmers themselves:

I am a poultry grower in Sussex County. My integrator (the company I contract to grow chickens with) is depopulating 3.2 million market- age chickens right now. The reason we are doing this is because we are running at about 1/3 of our production capacity due to employee absences at the processing plants. Many of these absences are not due to sickness but to fear and childcare issues. 

The farmer does not own the birds. We grow them on contract. They are not ours to give away. The company and farmers have liability concerns about people coming on farms to remove the birds before they are depopulated. 

It is not feasible to remove large numbers of birds to “sanctuaries”. I have two feed bins that hold 10 tons of feed each for each house. At market age those bins are filled every couple of days. Do the math and you will quickly see how financial contraints make that not a realistic option, not counting the transportation issue.

He notes that this will also happen for pigs. Put simply, the chickens, their eggs, and pigs are all being grown at fairly precise rates to enter the production system of Tyson and other such companies.

The days of the “Freezing Works” having vast paddocks into which to put stock temporarily have vanished under the JIT system. As soon as they’re ready in terms of size and finishing those chickens and pigs must be sent from farm to factory.

And with regard to those pigs here is a specific example from a farmer of what is about to happen because of those shuttered facilities:

“They cannot ‘hold’ them. Plants aren’t designed for over fat pigs. Buildings aren’t, either. First the gates and feeders will be wrecked.. then the slatted floors will start collapsing into the pits below. There’s simply no other way.
…
“Last weekend, [name redacted] and some friends and I processed 5 pigs in my garage. This was a huge undertaking. Small locker plants/butchers are running 6-7 days a week and are still booked for 3-7 months out. The Heartland has done all we can. It’s time to start the dozers, dig the pits, and embark on one of the most horrendous undertakings the American farmer has had to do in history. 

“I know of one farm wife who bought a hardware store out of .22 ammo (8,000 rounds) because they have 7500 market ready pigs and no outlet for them.
…
It’s been confirmed that large scale euthanasia of market ready hogs will begin in earnest this week. I’m estimating one million within 100 miles of me… worst case 10 million total nationwide. Poultry numbers will be much higher. Some people think beef could start in a month.

Based on that plea from Tyson, President Trump issued an order under the Defense Production Act to get the factories re-opened. Naturally that’s going to mean the spread of COVID-19 but at this stage it’s either that or:

Expect wide spread meat shortages in the next 10 days. This could extend for months.

A lot of things are going to be re-examined in the wake of this pandemic, which has revealed less a problem with human resistance to disease than a frighteningly thin level of resilence in many of our public and private systems. Turns out that reliability has a cost all its own.

I’ll leave the final word to the two farmers, starting with the chicken guy:

When I hear people dismiss the consequences of this quarantine as nothing more than me wanting to “go to bars and restaurants” they have no idea that we farmers of America are concerned with putting food on your table, not wining and dining ourselves.

And ending with the ‘hog’ guy:

“Our food supply chain is broken. The whole system is broken. And today, I feel very broken.  “‘Cheap’ and ‘convenient’ food supply is not necessarily a reliable one.”