The nation will see less and less pork during the rest of this pandemic.
Smithfield is one of the largest supply of pork in the United States and has been attacked with the known virus COVID-19. Several employees have fallen ill in the company in South Dakota.
Originally the company said it would close for three days to sanitize the equipment but then decided Sunday to close indefinitely.
According to The Daily Mail:
The CEO of Smithfield Foods has claimed the country's meat supply is at risk as the company is forced to close one of the country's largest pork processing facilities until further notice due to the coronavirus.
The facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is closing as a number of its employees have fallen ill with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and is one in a list of plants that have shut down during the crisis.
More than 11 meat packing and processing plants have now been closed in North America because of the impact of coronavirus, raising serious concerns about the supply chain in the U.S. and its ability to keep shelves stocked.
According to Smithfield, the plant accounts for 4 to 5 percent of the country's pork production. It supplies nearly 130 million servings of food per week, or about 18 million servings per day.
'The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,' the meat processor's CEO Kenneth Sullivan said in a statement on Sunday.
'It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain.'
Sullivan from Smithfield stated that the company had been operating during the pandemic to keep the supply on the shelves.
'We believe it is our obligation to help feed the country, now more than ever. We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19'
