AGRICULTURAL SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTIONS, COSTS, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE RESILIENCY OF THE U.S. FOOD SUPPLY

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Parts of U.S. food supply chains have been severely disrupted by COVID-19. Closures and slowdowns in packing and processing plants have resulted in a backlog of millions of animals that are ready for harvest, while shifts in demand for pork, beef, eggs, and dairy have created shortages at the retail level and excess supply in other areas of the supply chain. For hogs, this situation has forced some producers to euthanize animals. The carcass value of beef and pork has risen due to an economy-wide scarcity of meat. This situation has broken the traditional relationship between live animal and meat prices. Similarly, egg producers who sold into the liquid market have euthanized laying hens, and dairy farms and processors in some areas have been forced to let milk go to waste. Further along the supply chain, companies that distribute and transport meat, eggs, and dairy are operating below capacity due to high absenteeism among workers. The decreased amount of food making it into the retail stores has prompted retailers to increase prices and ration supplies to avoid stock-outs.The rationale and significance for this project are clear, and are echoed in our interactions with industry stakeholder groups, including producers, processors, and retail systems: the COVID-19 disruptions implicate and puts at risk occupiers of many levels of the U.S. food supply chain. Without quick, novel, and science-based direction, it is likely to repeat this fall if the pandemic returns.We have a short window of opportunity to create information our supply chain partners can use to alleviate the challenges and prevent future disasters in the U.S. food supply chain. Given this, our short-run objectives focus on developing and making available data visualization tools to help firms at critical levels of the supply chain alleviate the problems they return. Our long-run objectives focus on exploring the risk-return tradeoff of changes to each system--vis-à-vis investments in labor and technology--to improve its resilience in the face of future disruptions.Our project is an integratedinvestigation into four of the Midwest's key agricultural supply chains--pork, beef, eggs, and dairy--thatcombines data-driven analysis with interviews of participants along each product's supply chain to better understand how supply chains performed at the onset of COVID-19 disruptions and the stress-points in the supply chains. This information will be used to ultimately provide guidance and cost/benefit type analyses of supply chain improvements. The industry interviews are critical to providing context and robustness to the short- and long-run data-driven analyses, and both the interviews and analysis fully integrate into the long-run objectives of this project.