poultry

After two years of community protests, a proposal to build 13 chicken houses on a farm in Wicomico County, Maryland, was defeated last week. Neighbors worried about potential air and groundwater pollution from the influx of chickens.

Top U.S. poultry processors are planning to expand production this year, reports Bloomberg. As prices for feed grains have plummeted, worrying farmers, processors are taking advantage of the lower costs.

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.

The USDA forecasts Americans will eat a record amount of red meat and poultry this year — an average of 222.8 pounds per person. At the same time, “the mix of meats ... has shifted dramatically, with the share of beef declining” by one-third since peaking in the 1970s.

Two grocers last week filed a price-fixing lawsuit against the country’s top poultry processors. The suit alleges that the processors, including Tyson Foods, Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue Farms, have conspired to fix the price of broiler chickens over the course of several decades.

McDonald’s will now require chicken suppliers, including Tyson and Cargill, to treat animals more humanely at slaughter. “Birds sold to the chain ... no longer will be shocked, shackled by the feet to conveyors and have their throats slit ...,” says The Los Angeles Times. “Such methods can leave chickens fully conscious when they are slaughtered.”

Federal researchers say multi-drug resistance has increased to 12 percent of salmonella bacteria found in the digestive systems of ill people, up from 9 percent in the previous year. Salmonella is a common type of food-borne illness estimated to affect 1 million Americans annually and to cause 380 deaths a year.

Climate change’s impact on animal agriculture in the northeastern United States is expected to be mild overall — and in some cases new weather patterns might even help producers, says a study by Penn State, published in the journal Climatic Change.

Animal welfare activists, led by the Humane Society of the United States, have filed papers in California to introduce an initiative that would make all eggs cage-free in the state by 2022. 

A lawsuit between two neighbors in Colorado could set a precedent for Right to Farm laws, which seek to make it harder to sue family farms, across the country.

Gov. Larry Hogan stood aside and let a Maryland law take effect without his signature that will bar use of medically important antibiotics to promote weight gain among cattle, hogs and poultry. The Maryland law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the same implementation date as a similar law enacted in 2015 in California, the only other state to control antibiotic use with the goal of preserving the effectiveness of the drugs to fight disease in humans.

The United States is headed for its fifth year in a row of lower-than-normal food inflation, with prices forecast to rise by a marginal 0.5 percent this year.

Livestock producers typically want to get their animals to market weight quickly so they can sell them and make money. But in poultry, there's rising interest in broiler chickens that take longer to mature and are more expensive to raise, with the trade-off of tastier meat, says the New York Times.

Arizona health officials said two workers employed at poultry farms have recovered from mild cases of bird flu while the public health agency in Marin County, north of San Francisco, said it was investigating a possible bird flu infection of a child. If confirmed by the CDC, the U.S. total for bird flu infections would rise to 61 people in eight states this year.