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Livestock trucking industry also struggling with labor shortages
Labor shortages continue to plague the ag industry, and the livestock industry is no exception. Jara Settles with the Livestock Marketing Association says the labor squeeze goes beyond processing facilities.
“Even our own livestock auction markets members have been seeing labor as a huge challenge,” she says. “But particularly in the trucking context, going into the pandemic, we already had a trucking shortage.”
She tells Brownfield one of the unique challenges facing the industry is that not anyone with a CDL is able to haul livestock.
“A lot of them are cattle people themselves,” she says. “You put in 50,000 pounds of livestock and they move around on you, you need to know how to handle that.”
Settles says there were concerns new technologies, like the Electronic Logging Devices, would create even more labor shortages. “We were really thankful to see that that has not necessarily been the case because we’ve been able to slow down implementation to let those folks catch up with technology,” she says.
Brownfield interviewed Settles during Trade Talk at the recent National Association of Farm Broadcasting annual meeting.
AUDIO: Jara Settles, Livestock Marketing Association
