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NO Chops. (pork)

Smithfield Foods is shutting its processing plant in Sioux Falls for a couple weeks. A bunch of their workers have the virus.

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The workers will get paid.

Reply to
Dean Hoffman
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Dang. I'm going to have to buy my pork from the local producer. It's really nice stuff. Oh, well. We all have to make sacrifices.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

You might be interested to know that Smithfield is owned by WH Group- which is headquartered in.............China!!!!!

Reply to
Wade Garrett

Ever since Smithfield has gone Chinese, the product has really slipped a lot. Yesterday we had a Chin-field (or is it Smith-ese) ham and it was laden with chunks of fat ... never happened in the old days.

Reply to
Todesco

Maybe some good will come from the fiasco. LBJ observed that technology had reduced the need for farmers so they'd better go learn some other trade. Earl Butz doubled down with 'Get big or get out' and 'plow from fence to fence' and subsequent administrations supported industrial farming.

So now we have few local producers, huge hog farms and processing plants. The small farmer has been supplanted by huge conglomerates employing undocumented labor. I'd hate to yell 'Migra!' in the plant.

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The article is about the Tar Heel SC plant but i see no reason to think Sioux Falls is any different.

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Small farmers were destroyed, unions were destroyed, and my god how the money rolls in.

Reply to
rbowman

Do you think they are injecting the pigs with fat? Or just not trimmed as well as it should have been?

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I have been buying my eggs from a little hobby-farmer. Since this started, she has been sold out a couple times - It didn't make sense to me because the grocery stores were not sold out - when I asked the reason, she said that her regular customers were buying an extra dozen or two - plus the big farmers market 30 minutes away shut down - so some of those customers were coming to her. The hens were still laying the same ; her overall sales were the same - but the pattern of the sales were disrupted. I think some of the other "shortages" in the stores are for the same reason - not true shortages, but rather temporary disruptions in the buying habits & supply chains. John T.

Reply to
hubops

They've probably sped up the lines so they're not being trimmed as well.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

Yummmm! Chinese factory farm raised pigs.

Reply to
Arnold Ziffel

If sold by weight, maybe a way to leave on more fat for more profit.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

  Or maybe they just stopped trimming so they could charge ham prices for fat ... maximize those profits !
Reply to
Terry Coombs

Or maybe, just perhaps, you've been sucessfully trolled.

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

The Chinese purchased Smithfield in 2013 to gain access to the technology and genetics to support much-needed production increases for their local population.

They're not running the US facilities; they're taking the practices they're learning home to feed their own people.

Pork is 3/4 of meat consumption in China and the onesies-twosies very small individual producers simply can't produce the quantities needed. Plus, they don't have the resources for the quality control and hygiene a larger producer has.

Smithfield has production facilities within 30 miles here; they are a combination of company-owned and family farms raising pigs for them -- while they are sizable operations, they are run well by dedicated local folks.

Unfortunately, several of these facilities were burned in the OK panhandle wildfires last spring--I haven't been down to see whether they've got them all rebuilt and up again or not...

Reply to
dpb

Even where you have small farmers, their product often belongs to an agribusiness operation. They have to buy their seed, feed or whatever from the corporation and the corporation buys the product at their price. They are really surfs working for the gentry in the castle.

Reply to
gfretwell

They may also be raising fatter hogs. For a while the trend was toward very lean hogs. That was the "other white meat" days. It might just be that the consumer thought those Jane Fonda hogs produced dry, tasteless meat. I know pork loin isn't palatable unless you inject moisture and flavor in it.

Reply to
gfretwell

I find it's palatable if it's not overcooked. A week or two ago I grilled some loin pork chops to a rosy medium. They were delicious.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

Right. leave an extra 1/4" and it certainly adds up with the volume they produce.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

When were you a farmer? Pretty much everything you wrote is wrong.

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

I usually get the rib chops but I agree medium is good.

Reply to
gfretwell

I guess when 60 minutes ran the show on it they were just more fake news. This is what Wikipedia says, maybe you should go edit their page.,

"Founded in 1936 as the Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph W. Luter and his son, the company is the largest pig and pork producer in the world.[5] In addition to owning over 500 farms in the US, Smithfield contracts with another 2,000 independent farms around the country to grow Smithfield's pigs."

Reply to
gfretwell

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