USDA Wants to Eliminate Poultry Inspectors for Factory Birds
Besides the obvious food safety concerns expressed by Ken Ward below, there is quite possibly a far greater risk here in this new USDA plan to privatize poultry inspection. This rule change may exclude small pastured poultry producers from being able to comply and market their products.
Currently, it is very difficult for small-scale poultry producers to find processors that have a USDA inspector present when processing chicken. Several states do not have a single USDA certified processing plant available for smaller producers to process their high end free-range and pastured organic chickens. This is due to the fact that the large factory poultry operations, who do all of their processing in-house, have driven most other processing plants out of business.
Under current regulations, chicken processed without a USDA inspector present has a very limited market. Most farmers who are not growing factory birds sold to the main poultry operations that control all the chicken sold in the U.S., but instead raise pastured chickens outdoors that they market directly to health-conscious consumers, have to process their birds on their farm, due to the lack of processing facilities. In all states, there are limits as to how many chickens you are allowed to process on your farm, and the restrictions on selling those chickens vary greatly from state to state. Some states only allow one to sell these chickens on the farm where they were processed, which often is very far away from urban areas where most of the farmer’s customers would be.
In order to ship high quality chickens directly to customers in another state (as Tropical Traditions currently does through their Grass-fed line of meats produced by small family farms in Wisconsin), the FDA requires that the chickens have to be processed in a facility with a USDA inspector present. There are very few of these left in the United States, and if this new rule that USDA is proposing goes through, even those that are present will probably be eliminated. No one will be able to order chicken over the Internet anymore, greatly restricting your current food choices if you do not want to order factory chickens, and do not live close enough to a farm to drive somewhere to purchase a chicken raised outdoors on pasture.
Given this USDA plan, and the recent FDA plans for egg laying birds that would effectively eliminate eggs from pastured chickens, one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a concerted effort to squeeze free range and pastured poultry farmers out of the market in favor of factory birds? Factory chickens make up a multi-billion dollar industry that often gets its way with government officials, as was seen recently in Maryland where they convinced the government to delay action at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay from chicken manure run-off because it would have hurt their sales too much.
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Published on Sep 6, 2013
Right
before the Labor Day weekend went into full swing, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture announced that the organization had ended a ban on
Chinese chicken imports.
A significant percentage of products we use are manufactured in China. But how about processed food?Right before the Labor Day weekend went into full swing, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the organization had ended a ban on Chinese chicken imports.
Four Chinese poultry processing plantswere officially permitted to ship processed chicken to the United States. The decision to allow these 4 plants to ship processed chicken to America was reached after inspections conducted earlier in the year.
The completed report on the passing poultry plants noted that the audit's goal was "to determine whether the People's Republic of China's food safety system governing poultry processing remains equivalent to that of the United States, with the ability to produce products that are safe, wholesome, unadulterated, and properly labeled."
For now in the beginning stages, the chicken will be slaughtered in the United States and in other certified countries before being shipped to China for processing and re-exported back to the US.
What do you think? Would you eat chicken that you knew came from China?
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