Meat Cutters Booked Months Out As COVID-19 Spurs Push to Buy Local Meat

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(KNSI) – It seemed as if everything ground to a halt in the spring of 2020. With large meat cutting facilities becoming early hotspots for COVID-19 infections and thousands of restaurants shutting down service, there were new kinks in the food supply chain for farmers, middlemen and consumers to handle.

COVID-19’s impacts on the meat industry continue, almost a year after the virus entered the U.S. Marianne Galles, co-owner of T&R Meat Processing in Clearwater, says the shortage of meat products at grocery stores and supermarkets earlier on in the pandemic inspired people to reach out to their local farmers to buy meat directly from them. This led to increased demand for custom processing services at businesses like Galles’. The line grew longer, too.

“Beef are right now, at this point in time, we’d kind of be booked out through February, March,” Galles said in early January, “and we’re booked out until June.”

Autumn also looks busy for Galles and her husband Randy, T&R’s other co-owner. She said some livestock producers are planning for future farm-to-table customers.

“Most of the fall bookings from September through the end of the year are full at this point because they scheduled a couple more beef in, in the hopes that some of those customers from early spring will be repeat customers,” Galles said.

Each week, Galles estimates T&R processes up to 15 cattle, eight hogs and six sheep. She said the pandemic and the influx of orders has not changed T&R’s processing pace.

“There’s more cautions put in place, like the masks and then sanitizing in between when customers come in, that type of thing,” Galles said. “And then, from March to … July, we actually had our customers do curbside pickup, and we didn’t have them come into the building so that it was an extra layer of protection for employees so that we could continue to do our processing.”

The USDA has several resources for farmers and livestock producers during the COVID-19 pandemic that can be found online.