New Processing Plant Creates
Profitable Poultry Sales in Mississippi
While farmers across the country, particularly
in the mild South, are increasingly interested
in profitable pastured poultry enterprises,
the limited number of processing houses for
small quantities of birds has become a major
roadblock. With SARE funds, Heifer Project
International has chipped away at that obstacle,
creating more processing opportunities in
Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi by building
a unit on wheels, expanding an existing plant
to include poultry, and helping streamline
state policies restricting processing.
In Mississippi, representatives from Heifer
Project International worked with Blackwater
Farms of DeKalb to upgrade their plant, which
already processed steers and other ruminants,
to include poultry. In mid-2004, Blackwater
unveiled the new-and-improved plant on the
Mississippi-Alabama border. It serves as
a hub for a new network of five poultry growers
who now process some 500 birds a week and
co-market to restaurants in Jackson and Birmingham. “It
fills a need,” said Gus Heard-Hughes,
Heifer’s Alabama coordinator, who continues
to work with the network on sales options
like farmers markets, especially during the
winter season when supply continues apace
but demand traditionally slackens.
Thanks to Heifer-sponsored meetings with
public officials, Mississippi legislators
passed a new law that allows poultry processors
who follow specific guidelines to be exempt
from inspection and process up to 20,000
birds a year, in keeping with federal rules.
In Kentucky, Heifer worked with public health
officials to construct a state-approved mobile
unit to process poultry, freshwater shrimp,
and fish. While they envisioned a unit that
would travel from farm to farm, the unit
thus far only travels for aquaculture processing—poultry
requires more equipment and a more elaborate
base station. Poultry processing in the unit
has been limited to its home base in Frankfort,
with another station under construction in
eastern Kentucky.
Farmers have slaughtered a few thousand
chickens at the new unit, but aquaculture,
with lesser processing restrictions, is its
likely future, said Steve Muntz, Heifer’s
USA Country Program Director and leader of
the SARE-funded project. “It was a
huge accomplishment to get something like
this approved and to raise awareness of how
big this issue is,” said Muntz, who
sees pastured poultry as a lucrative supplemental
enterprise, particularly for small-scale
or limited-resource farmers. “Small
farmers don’t have access to processing.” The
project also spawned publications for farmers
about poultry-raising, including an entrepreneur’s “toolbox,” guides
to processing and genetics, and poultry nutrition.
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