By JIM RUTLEDGE

D.C. Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The demand to put more chicken on dinner plates, heightened by a domestic and international demand for more chicken meat, has prompted poultry farmers nationwide to petition the USDA to raise the processing line speeds of chicken slaughters by 25 percent.

Earlier this month the National Chicken Council (NCC) filed a 13-page petition with the agriculture department seeking a waiver of the existing processing limits, to boost the speed by which birds are slaughtered per minute (BPM). Its producers want to speed up the process from 140 to 175 BPM, or 2.33 birds per second.

If granted, the change would overturn an Obama administration rule from 2014 that slowed the process because of concerns about food safety.

“This change will not affect food safety,” the NCC’s President Michael Brown said. “If anything, it will enhance it by encouraging more participation in the agency’s New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS) and the Salmonella Initiative Program (SIP), and provide improvements and cost savings for both the industry and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).”

The petition waiver comes at a time when some of the nation’s top chicken processing companies are building new high-tech facilities and hiring more employees, spending a combined $1.2 billion and employing nearly 5,500 new workers. If the waiver is approved, plants are expected to turn out more meat, boosting sales and higher profits in the $25 billion-plus industry.

Tyson Foods, Inc. announced Sept. 5 it will invest more than $320 million for a new processing plant in northeastern Kansas that will employ 1,600 workers. The plant in Tonganoxie, 30 miles west of Kansas City, will open about mid-2019.

Costco Wholesale Corp. broke ground in June building its first poultry processing plant and hatchery, a $300 million facility in Fremont, Neb., creating 800 new jobs. Once the Lincoln Premium Poultry facility opens, Costco said it expects to process 2 million birds per week.

Sanderson Farms, Inc. started construction earlier this summer on a new poultry-processing complex in Smith and Wood counties, Texas, investing $200 million, with associated contract growers investing an additional $135 million as part of the state-of-the-art facilities. Planned are a new feed mill, hatchery, wastewater treatment facility and a processing plant employing more than 1,700 workers.

The plans call for the facility to process 1.25 million birds each week when the complex opens in the first quarter of 2019.

In January, Sanderson opened a new 180,000 square-foot, $155 million processing and wastewater treatment facility in St. Pauls, N.C., its 11th full-integrated plant in the United States. The company has hired 1,100 new workers supported by 100 contract growers.

The operation joins Sanderson’s 65,000 square-foot hatchery in Lumberton, N.C., and its feed mill in Kinston. The new operation will also turn out 1.25 million birds per week.

And, in West Baltimore, Md., family-owned Holly Poultry, Inc., which processes chicken for Perdue Farms and other food distributors, started construction three months ago on a new 38,000 square-foot plant that will add 150 new workers over the next few years.

According to the NCC, chicken processing is expected to exceed 41,039 billion pounds of ready-to-cook meat this year, up almost 2 percent from last year. Americans consume about 90.3 pounds per capita, the majority of it breast meat and deep-fried wings. (One example: The NCC reports we consumed 1.3 billion chicken wings during the 2017 Super Bowl, or 162.5 million pounds).

U.S. chicken exports continue to rebound from the record year of 2014, when the nation exported 7.3 billion pounds of chicken, as compared to nearly 6.9 billion the country is projected to ship internationally this year. With all this demand for poultry, the NCC says it needs the wavier.

The boost in online processing, however, is not without its critics from union officials and others who worry about workplace injuries that may result when employees move carcasses more rapidly, causing cuts, infections and related repetitive motion injury.

But studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) show injury rates in poultry processing plants have steadily declined from 9.8 cases per 100 full-time workers to fewer than 5 per 100 last year, according to DOL data.

The NCC says its petition also falls in line with President Trump’s widespread initiatives of regulatory reform, and his goal to expand domestic manufacturing. Brown further argued that “issuing a waiver to the maximum permission line speeds would create efficiency gains without sacrificing food safety or worker safety, all while enabling FSIS to advance food safety through separate regulations.”

In a response to Farm World seeking comment on the waiver, an agency email replied in part: “The FSIS will continue to consider line speeds at establishments that are capable of consistently producing safe, wholesome and unadulterated product and are meeting pathogen reduction and other performance standards.”

The agency did not respond about when the FSIS will act on the petition.