The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has allowed many professions to rethink how they do business, including meat and poultry processing plants. Increased automation and robotics allow plants to continue operations, while limiting the risk of infecting workers — or animals.
“What COVID-19 revealed is that our food supply chain was most vulnerable to human-spread pandemics where reliance on labor was most acute, and it makes sense to explore options to reduce labor density should we face similar problems in the future,” says Jayson Lusk, Ph.D, distinguished professor and head of the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Ind.