The now-shuttered Smithfield Foods plant at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has been linked to more than 600 cases of COVID-19.
The Centres for Disease Control is sending a team to investigate the huge hog-slaughtering facility.
United States Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue and the state governor are now also involved. Purdue wants the plant open again.
Smithfield’s chief executive officer, Kenneth Sullivan, said hog farmers need the plant re-opened.
I don't want to be Chicken Little here, but I'm telling you there's an acute crisis that we've got to deal with; we have to operate these processing plants even when we have COVID. If we don't, we sadly won't have food," Sullivan said.
Dermot Hayes, an economist with Iowa State University, and Steve Meyer, a pork industry economist with Kerns & Associates, estimate that hog farmers will lose nearly $37 per hog, or almost $5 billion collectively, for each hog marketed for the rest of the year, the National Pork Producers Council said.
