The biggest short-term disruption is the fact that a growing number of meat processing plants — where workers slaughter livestock and package food products — are shutting down as employees get sick from the coronavirus.

On April 12, Smithfield Foods said it was closing its Sioux Falls, S.D., plant indefinitely after 230 workers became infected. The facility processes roughly 5 percent of the nation’s pork. In Greeley, Colo., where at least four meatpacking workers have died, one of the nation’s largest beef-processing plants has shut down. Other plants in Iowa and Pennsylvania have also closed temporarily.

Plants like these are at the heart of a $140 billion meat industry that processes some 9 billion chickens, 32 million cattle and 121 million hogs each year. On the whole, agriculture accounts for 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock responsible for roughly two-fifths of that, much of it because of methane from burping cows and decomposing animal manure.

For now, there’s no danger of a large-scale meat shortage in grocery stores, analysts said. That’s because there are still hundreds of millions of pounds of beef, chicken and pork piled up in cold storage, particularly since producers are no longer selling to shuttered restaurants and schools. And processing plants that remain open have capacity to pick up slack.

Still, there are vulnerabilities.

Just 15 plants, mostly in the Midwest, slaughter nearly 60 percent of the nation’s pigs each day. “If we get to the point where we don’t have enough pork in storage, and multiple plants are no longer in operation, than we could have problems,” said Dermot Hayes, an economist at Iowa State University, at a news conference on Tuesday. “But we’re not there yet.”