Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 4/30/20

The Minnesota Democrat said Wednesday that he will personally see to it that the agriculture industry does not suffer from a national emergency like the coronavirus again. "I can tell you as chairman of the ag committee — this is not going to happen again on my watch," Peterson said during a press conference in Worthington, Minn., on how pork producers are being hurt by the pandemic.

"We're going to have a way to respond to emergencies," Peterson said. "Whatever it is we're not going to go through with a situation where we're caught flat footed."

Peterson said he had formed a local task force to help pork producers deal with a massive backlog of hogs caused by meat processing plant closures. Before President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday to keep plants open, Peterson had struck a deal with a shuttered JBS plant in Minnesota to ease the burden by having workers euthanize up to 13,000 hogs daily.

With fewer places to send hogs ready to be slaughtered, farmers must euthanize the animals themselves — which is a near impossible task, the chairman said.

Expansion of executive order: Peterson added that he had a conversation with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Wednesday morning in which the secretary floated the idea of having the federal government cover the costs of "depopulating" hogs if the backlog remains a problem.