The COVID-19 pandemic impacted meat production, supply chain, and meat prices that caused a severe socio-economic crisis worldwide. Initially, meat and meat products' prices increased due to less production and increased demand because of panic buying. Whereas, later on, both meat production and demand were significantly decreased due to lockdown restrictions and lower purchasing power of the consumers that results in a decrease in meat prices. In early April 2020, meat packing facilities started to shut down due to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus among workers. Furthermore, meat producers and processors faced difficulty in harvesting and shipment of the products due to lockdown situations, decrease in labor force, restrictions in movement of animals within and across the country and change in legislation of local and international export market. These conditions adversely impacted the meat industry due to decrease in meat production, processing and distribution facilities. It is suggested that the integration among all the meat industry stakeholders is quite essential for the sustainability of the industry's supply chain to cope with such devastating conditions the future may hold. This review aimed to discuss different aspects of the meat industry and supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic and proposed some future directions.

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Meat quality is of great interest to producers, consumers, and scientists, as it mainly includes tenderness, color, water-holding capacity, and nutritional value of meat (Hopkins & Geesink, 2009). Tenderness is considered the most critical palatability factor that can affect meat quality (Koohmaraie & Geesink, 2006). Researchers found that inadequate tenderness plays a significant role in consumer dissatisfaction while they are willing to pay extra money on guaranteed tender beef (Feldkamp, Schroeder, & Lusk, 2005). The tenderness is primarily influenced by the production and processing factors. The production factors mainly include animal species, breed, gender, age, weight at slaughter, and nutritional management at the farm. On the other hand, processing factors generally involve postharvest-specific techniques like carcass chilling and aging to enhance the tenderness of beef. Among the production factors, animal age at slaughter has a strong impact on tenderness (Lawrence, Whatley, Montgomery, Perino, & Dikeman, 2001). Most of the studies have consistently concluded that the advancement of animal age leads to a decrease in beef tenderness due to the deposition of heat-stable collagen fibers (Xiong et al., 2007).

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The present study evaluated performance, physiological response and economics of commercial fast growing (CFG), commercial slow growing (CSG), and Rhode Island Red (RIR) chickens under intensive and free-range rearing environments. After 21 days of rearing under the same intensive environment 240 birds from each strain were subjected to free-range and intensive rearing until they were 56 days old. Each treatment was replicated six times with 20 birds in each replicate. Body surface and cloacal temperatures, respiration and heart rates, feed intake, bodyweight and weight gain, feed conversion efficiency, growth efficiency, and liveability were recorded. Significant differences among strains were detected in physiological response and growth performance (except liveability). Rearing environment also caused significant differences in physiological parameters (except body surface temperature) and growth performance (except liveability). Significant interactions of the strains and production systems were detected. The CFG strain grew most rapidly under the intensive system with differences between strains being reduced in the free-range system. The RSG and CSG strains had similar respiration rates under the two production systems but differed significantly from each other. However, the CFG strain had a significantly elevated respiration rate in the free-range system. Total input cost of rearing CFG under the intensive system was highest ($3.54) among the treatments, whereas CSG under a free-range environment generated the highest profit ($0.37 per bird). In conclusion, rearing CSG under free range was the most economic farming strategy in today’s scenario.Keywords: economics, fast-growing, free range, growth, intensive system, physiology, slow-growing rural chickens