by Chris Jay
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Over the last 10 years or so, Evan McCommon has probably gotten tired of talking to me about his family’s farm in Haughton, Mahaffey Farms. I don’t blame him. In my professional role as a local booster, I’ve filled his chicken coops with Instagram influencers, thrust a microphone under his nose as he wrestled piglets out of a feed trough, and generally intruded upon dozens of otherwise peaceful and productive days. I don’t believe he’s ever been comfortable serving as a de facto mouthpiece for local farmers when folks like me need a quote for their stories.
But here we are again.
“Is now a good time?”
“There’s never a good time, actually.”
I knew he was kidding, but I also knew he wasn’t. I’d called Evan to ask how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting his small beef, pork and chicken farm.
“Our business has gone up five to seven times in volume,” he said. “That’s a lot. It’s depleting our inventory more rapidly than we’re able to produce.”
Faced with a wave of panic-buying early in the pandemic, Mahaffey Farms was forced to choose between supplying meat to retail customers or commercial accounts.
“Most all of our commercial and restaurant accounts, we’ve had to cancel,” Evan said. “When it comes right down to it, our retail customers come first.”
Even so, they’ve had to put measures in place to combat hoarding. There’s a four-chicken limit on home deliveries, and Evan has fielded “a lot of calls from people wanting to purchase half a cow or half a pig,” requests which he has denied.
“It’s a problem that perpetuates itself,” he said. “When people hear in the media that a meat shortage is coming, they start trying to hoard. When they start trying to hoard, that behavior creates meat shortages.”
I should note here that, at every turn in our conversation, Evan encouraged me to speak with Craig Smith of Smith Family Farms, who has been working for years towards a solution to our region’s shortage of USDA-certified meat processing facilities. I definitely want to speak to Smith, but I’m not sure that I’m smart enough on this topic to ask the right questions, yet.
Mahaffey Farms is able to process chickens on-site, up to 20,000 chickens per year. Their beef, however, is processed at a small facility that is only able to process a few head of Mahaffey cattle each week. Compared to large, corporate meat-processing facilities like those temporarily closing due to COVID-19 outbreaks, Evan describes Mahaffey Farms as “microscopic, a gnat.”
“A factory farm processes 400 head of cattle an hour; we process four head a week,” he said.
But the smallness of Mahaffey Farms makes it nimble. Evan and his team, namely a former employee named Lauren Jones, introduced direct-to-consumer home delivery of locally raised meats and produce in 2015. Two years later, the farm acquired a neighboring property in order to make room for their growing chicken operation. In retrospect, a vastly increased chicken output and several years of experience fine-tuning home delivery turned out to be excellent attributes to possess as America headed into 2020.
The ride has not been smooth. Evan joked that he wishes a camera crew had been following his family for the past two months “just to show how crazy it’s been.” They close the farm gate these days to prevent drive-up business and have temporarily closed the farm store in order to focus on a booming grocery delivery service. In addition to their own pasture-raised meats and eggs, the Mahaffey Farms online grocery now stocks nearly 500 items, ranging from locally made Morell Dairy Farm butter to Kingsford charcoal briquets.
“We’d already started the process of delivering clean groceries when this thing hit,” Evan said. “But this crisis catapulted us into the future.”
So, about that crisis.
As I understand it, it has to do with America’s over-reliance on huge, centralized meat processing facilities run by companies like Cargill and Smithfield. One Smithfield plant, located in Sioux Falls, ND, was the site of the largest cluster of COVID-19 cases in America. At that plant, which processes five percent of America’s pork, nearly 900 workers tested positive for COVID-19. Something like 10,000 workers at meat processing facilities in the U.S. have contracted COVID-19 as of May 30, 2020, causing temporary shutdowns at dozens of facilities and, more importantly, an unknowable amount of suffering and death among their mostly brown and black workers.
On May 4, Smithfield began a phased reopening of its Sioux Falls plant. Coronavirus testing was recommended for returning workers, but not required.
“Thousands of beef producers no longer have anywhere to go,” Evan said. “If you live in Virginia right now, and you want to process your own beef, you have to wait until 2021. They’re already booked all the way through 2020.”
I live in Shreveport, so I am accustomed to searching every incoming piece of terrible news for any semblance of a silver lining. And, honestly, helping others pan for that silver lining has become the closest thing that I have to a life’s work. So I’m always asking questions like “What can we learn, as a society, from this moment?” when what I really feel like saying, in my heart, is “So, we’re fucked, right?”
I asked Evan a question about hope, teachable moments, or something.
“You know, every little town used to have a butcher shop, and a meat processor, and they would process and package locally or regionally raised meats,” Evan said. “We’re hoping that this will teach the public that the U.S. now has a system that is very weak in the face of global catastrophe due to too much centralization. Small is best.”
That’s the kind of epic final quote that Evan is good at, and it’d normally serve as the kind of mic-drop I use to provide an emotional wallop at the end of a story. But I have one more thing to say.
I love barbecue more than you can possibly imagine. Some of the relationships that I treasure most were born over three-meat plates with white bread and pickles and potato salad and 32-ounce tankards of sweet tea. And in Louisiana, correctly done barbecue—slow-smoked at a low temperature using an offset smoker filled with smoldering wood—remains surprisingly hard to find.
When I do rarely encounter good barbecue in these parts, it is almost uniformly served by a black-owned restaurant or food truck that serves a predominantly black clientele. Restaurateurs like Harvey “Papa” Clay of Real BBQ and Marcus Williams of Louisiana Smokehouse are able to thrive precisely because the price of American meat is artificially suppressed through exploitative, dehumanizing business practices.
But that’s not the barbecue joint’s fault, is it? Swearing off factory-floor pork would mean no longer supporting these businesses—or any regional barbecue joint that I can name, for that matter.
What’s a conscious person who loves barbecue to do? I don’t have an answer, or a pullquote-worthy closing thought. We all have to perform this complicated ethical calculus for ourselves.
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