Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"A supply chain looks fundamentally at linkages and production. So, for example, you just don't look at the construction of a home on site, but you look at all of the supply lines that led to that construction. For example, if you were going to pick out the lumber component, you would go all the way back to the forest that grew the lumber, then sent it to the lumber mill, to the lumber yard and finally on site at the home. And to have a good functioning economic system, you have to have, for most of these products, a good functioning supply chain. Now where this ties into North Carolina is we have an industry in our state that has been a leader in the development of the supply chain. It's an industry that many people would not think about in this context, and it's the hog industry. In fact, you can argue that the supply chain was in some sense perfected in the North Carolina hog industry. And that today with our hog industry - which, of course, is big business in North Carolina - you have the linkages from the farm level, where the pigs are raised, all through the processor, where they're processed into meat, then to the wholesaler and finally to the retail buyers. And that's all been integrated. It's all been coordinated, and it's really helped agriculture revive in Eastern North Carolina."