A University of Missouri rural sociology professor says the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues in the food chain.
Mary Hendrickson said the top four food processors in the U.S. make up more than 50 percent of the market.
“This concentration has real impacts for farmers,” Hendrickson said. “So, what we’ve seen in the last few decades, the last three decades, we’ve seen the number of farms decrease and we’ve seen the scale of those farms increase.”
She said in the last 33 years, the average swine farm went from managing 2,500 pigs to over 50,000 now and dairy farms went from 80 cows to 1,300.
