The public comment period ends today for a proposed regulatory framework to curb salmonella contamination in poultry products, and some small producers are reportedly worried.
According to the Daily Yonder, there’s concern the new rules could put small farmers out of business.
“The larger, integrated facilities will be able to find ways to meet these regulations. … that won’t be available to the smaller processors and producers,” Charles Ryan Wilson, owner of Maine’s Common Wealth Poultry, told the news outlet.
“If [the larger companies] get a salmonella positive, they’re just going to waterbath chill those birds and send them to get cooked and be made into something else, and those birds will remain legal and it won’t really cause any disruption in their supply chain,” Kristen Kilfoyle Boffo of Walden Local Meat in Boston, Mass., told Daily Yonder. “But for us, we’d be dead in the water.”
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) in October released its suggested framework. It followed an FSIS announcement two months earlier that the agency would declare salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products.
