The slaughter robots have been delayed
The pandemic was supposed to kickstart a new era in meat industry automation. What really happened?
In the spring of 2020, rising numbers of midwest slaughterhouse workers started to become infected with Covid-19. As meatpacking plants became Covid hotspots, facilities either shut down or slowed down, creating a temporary bottleneck in processing that forced livestock farmers to “depopulate” millions of chickens, cattle and hogs.
Processing plants quickly got back up to speed but the virus continued to spread. And it turned out the number of sick and dead workers was far worse than initially reported by the few media outlets covering these outbreaks. In October 2021, a congressional investigation revealed the actual number of infected workers was “nearly three times” higher than estimated.
Meanwhile, the threat of meat shortages in grocery stores had piqued the public’s interest. Media outlets responded with new reporting on the industry, including coverage of what the future of meatpacking may hold. In a handful of stories published in 2020 and 2021, several outlets predicted that the pandemic would hasten the meat industry’s adoption of automated slaughter and processing machines:
May 2020: Covid-19 Makes the Case for More Meatpacking Robots | WIRED
July 2020: Tyson Foods speeds up plans for robot butchers during pandemic | Food Dive
July 2020: The Motley Fool Tyson Foods' $500M Investment in Automation Not Enough, More to Come | Nasdaq
Robot chicken butchers, brought to you by Covid-19 | The Counter
November 2020: Meat processors expedite plans to implement robotics as pandemic increases pressure | Food Dive
Updated in December 2021: Tyson Foods Ramps Up Meat-Plant Automation Plans - WSJ
Robotic butchers were already in place in a few companies, including Danish Crown, the European pork producer featured in Wired's May 2020 story. Danish Crown did a much better job at avoiding Covid outbreaks as compared to slaughterhouses in the US, primarily because its facilities are almost entirely automated (and also because of better health care in Denmark and the government’s early lockdowns).
US meatpacking plants may quickly follow in Danish Crown’s footsteps, the media coverage suggested, switching from human workers to automation in order to keep producing massive amounts of meat, no matter the state of this or any future pandemic.
There’s just one problem: Danish Crown is the exception, not the rule. Other than quotes from meat company executives — promises for the future and crises of conscience about the past — these stories included very few specifics showing that the bigger meat conglomerates had actually committed to changing labor practices.
In one story for Food Dive, an engineering director from Tyson Foods shows a robotic butcher over a FaceTime call from the company’s automation center in downtown Springdale, Arkansas. Readers are told the machines used in the center are now “being dispatched” across the country. How many machines? To which facilities? The article does not say. Nor does it include details that might show how “Smithfield, Cargill and JBS are all looking into ways to incorporate more automation as they modernize their plants.”
Just that: “Food Dive took tours, interviewed companies and spoke to experts about where these meat companies stand in that process and what a more robotic meat plant future could look like in the U.S.”
Tyson Foods’ automation center initially opened in August 2019, the summer before the pandemic. The facility was touted as state-of-the-art and visitor-friendly. Local schools with STEM programs would be invited to see the future of meat processing technology. Yet just under a mile away is the company’s headquarters on Berry Street. By May 2021, 416 workers there had become infected with Covid-19.
Tyson Foods also told the Wall Street Journal it would increase its investment in automation to 1.3 billion over three years.
That certainly sounds like a lot of money, but Tyson Foods has an annual operating budget of 42 billion dollars, and there are few specifics in the story other than company-provided predictions.
Tyson Foods told the Wall Street Journal it “plans to open 12 new plants over the next two years, increasing its overall production capacity by about 1.3 billion pounds,” which it expects will save the company “$450 million.” That’s a fraction of the company’s overall output. Is this a new and dramatic “ramp-up” to automation or is this just business-as-usual improvements that would have happened anyway, regardless of the pandemic?
Financial reports suggest that robotic technologies will be used to replace jobs that can’t be filled due to labor shortages (that mostly pre-dated the pandemic). At the same time, the company says it will be increasing efficient production, which is usually accomplished by implementing faster line speeds. Faster line speeds are also associated with increases in worker injuries and exposure to viruses — creating a more dangerous workplace, not a safer one.
According to an October 2020 paper published in Animal Frontiers, the industry has gradually increased its use of automation over the past several decades and likely will continue to move in that direction, but the jobs associated with primary processing — both slaughtering the animal and breaking it down from its carcass — are some of the most dangerous and also the most difficult to replace:
That’s because animals, even livestock animals bred with a great deal of precision, aren’t ever going to be exactly uniform. And automated systems do better with uniform pieces of meat that have already gone through the first stage of processing.
Another challenge is that automated systems are expensive and labor tends to be cheap, at least when you can find it. Many slaughterhouses rely on undocumented workers. Some entice prospective employees looking to come to the US from El Salvador or the Marshall Islands. Automation has actually been used as a threat against workers, discouraging them from demanding higher pay or safer conditions.
Automated systems require more maintenance than a lower tech system, which means more workers, training and money. In many cases, a source familiar with the industry told me, plant managers decide to stick with existing low-tech systems because that’s just easier to deal with than figuring out a whole new infrastructure.
Unanswered questions remain
There’s no question that companies are struggling to find people to take on the most grueling meatpacking work — they already were prior to the pandemic — and that may speed up an industry-wide transition to automation. But we don’t actually know that’s true just because the industry told us so. The industry had already been slowly moving in that direction, and it may just continue to move along at the same pace.
How many new machines have actually rolled out so far, and to which plant locations? To replace or fill how many jobs? Does the new robotic equipment improve conditions for workers? Does it replace the kinds of jobs that are more vulnerable to the spread of a virus or does it replace work that’s already safer by design?
Most of these companies are not transparent about working conditions, nor do they let press in to cover what it’s actually like to be employed there. What was presented by the meat industry in these stories went largely unchallenged, which meant industry-crafted numbers and narratives took the place of deeper reporting and verified facts.
Hits and Misses: What I cooked for my non-vegan family this week
Hits: Baby’s first vegan seder! I made chocolate covered matzoh crunch by using Earth’s Best buttery sticks and dark chocolate chips. I also cooked a vegan version of this New York Times’ butter tofu recipe (yes, you can ignore that ‘sorry vegans’ note since my version was fab) and a few others, plus a very good baked saffron rice.
Misses: The potato dish linked above was a bit of a miss, but I think it’s because I added too much water to the pot at the end so the potatoes didn’t get a chance to caramelize.
What I’m Reading
Eating local won’t fight climate change, Kenny Torrella, Future Perfect newsletter
Amid Bird Flu Outbreak, Meat Producers Seek “Ventilation Shutdown” to Mass-Suffocate Chickens, Marina Bolotnikova , The Intercept
Same thing happened in Tönnies meat production house in Germany in 2020 although most of the covid infection also came from workers living condition.
The meat industry is suspect, to say the least, in every single freaking aspect. Thank you for covering these dirty well, cursewords (I don't curse, but my instinct started with a "b" and ended with "ds".