chicken production

Raw chicken will be rejected as an ingredient in making breaded, stuffed chicken products if there is too much salmonella bacteria in the meat — a step to protect consumers from food-borne illness, said the Agriculture Department. The rule, which would take effect in a year, is the first to name salmonella as an adulterant in a class of raw poultry products.

Two companies that grow “cultivated” chicken in fermentation vats rather than slaughtering poultry said on Wednesday their products will soon be sold in U.S. restaurants now that they have received final clearance from the government. “This approval will fundamentally change how meat makes it to the table,” said the chief executive of UPSIDE Foods.

Scientists confirmed a backyard flock of poultry in northwestern Tennessee was infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), part of a resurgence of the disease in the central states. Some 3.37 million birds in domestic flocks have died of bird flu so far this month; nationwide losses during September will be the largest since April.

More than four years after the Trump administration nixed the idea, the Biden administration proposed a broad-ranging set of animal welfare rules for organic farms. Producers already are required to provide their animals with year-round access to the outdoors and enough room to stretch their limbs. Agriculture Undersecretary Jenny Moffit said on Friday the proposed regulation would "establish and clarify clear standards for organic livestock and poultry production.”

The Agriculture Department confirmed outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAi) in adjoining Ulster and Dutchess counties in upstate New York, about 80 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River. The USDA has confirmed 12 other cases, all in the eastern half of the nation, since Feb. 8.

Livestock processing plants "may act as transmission vectors" for spreading the coronavirus, said researchers who estimated the plants were associated with from 6 to 8 percent of Covid-19 cases nationwide during the early months of the pandemic. "Ensuring both public health and robust essential supply chains may require an increase in meatpacking oversight and potentially a shift toward more decentralized, smaller-scale meat production," said the researchers in a paper appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Making a living as a chicken farmer has never been easy. But today in the U.S., it has more than a whiff of indentured servitude. A handful of big companies control the market, and farmers raise chickens under contract, with very little control over the things they need to be successful, from feed and stock to the birds’ healthcare. Now, as Leah Douglas and Chris Leonard explain in FERN’s latest investigation with the Guardian, there’s a way for poultry companies to insure tight market control. Based on leaked documents, the report shows how “[t]he U.S. poultry industry is able to share highly detailed information on farmer pay … giving companies the potential to collude and suppress prices paid to farmers already struggling to keep themselves afloat on razor-thin margins.” (No paywall) (No paywall)

Recent actions by the GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration have exempted big livestock operations from reporting air emissions, according to the latest story from FERN, published with Mother Jones. (No paywall)

California's Prop 12, which prohibits the sale of eggs in the state from chickens housed in battery cages, along with the arrival of the first viable egg substitutes, amounts to a one-two punch that could mark the beginning of the end of the industrial egg, writes Rowan Jacobsen in FERN's latest story, published with New Food Economy. (No paywall)

Last fall, a small community in northeast Kansas made headlines when thousands of residents protested the announcement that a Tyson poultry processing plant would soon be built nearby. Once the residents of Tonganoxie won their “No Tyson in Tongie” campaign, other communities followed suit. Now, state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it easier for communities to vote on whether to introduce new poultry processing facilities or large-scale farms in their communities, reports High Plains Public Radio.

Poultry processors will soon be able to ask the USDA’s meat safety agency for permission to run slaughter lines at up to 175 birds per minute, an increase from the current limit of 140 birds.

A class-action lawsuit in Arkansas challenges as unconstitutional two drug- and alcohol-rehabilitation programs that require participants to work for free at chicken processing plants and a plastic manufacturing plant, reports Reveal, from the Center from Investigative Reporting. The programs are populated by defendants who are sent to rehab as an alternative to imprisonment.