Amidst the annual holiday boom in turkey sales, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing a new rule to reduce salmonella in poultry. That's a laudable goal, but the actual regulation—as is often the case—is being shaped in a way that hurts small farmers and meat processors while helping large agricultural conglomerates.
This rule has been in the works for a while. In 2020, the USDA's Food Inspection Safety Service (FSIS) started making moves to reduce salmonella illnesses by 25 percent—part of the federal government's "2030 Healthy People" initiative. The government has been targeting salmonella in the country's poultry supply for even longer than that, and those efforts have brought down its prevalence in chicken and turkey. Yet that has not translated into a reduction in salmonella-based illnesses among Americans.
Many reasons have been proposed for this discrepancy. One likely cause is the fact that there are more than 2,500 salmonella serotypes but only around 100 cause human illnesses—and of those, only a handful are considered high-virulence in terms of the threat they pose. Current federal policy focuses on testing for any variant of salmonella instead of concentrating on the most problematic strains.
Theoretically, the new proposal will create a more nuanced and targeted system that focuses on just six serotypes in raw poultry that cause the most illnesses. (The agency finalized a similar rule on salmonella in breaded chicken products earlier this year.) But while the intent to exchange the regulatory axe for a scalpel is commendable, the actual impact will disproportionately hurt small farmers and meat processors—and still might miss the most important way to keep consumers from coming down with these diseases.
The proposed rule is based on numerous "components" that the USDA concludes will help with controlling salmonella in poultry. The agency proposes that if various raw poultry products contain "any detectable level of at least one of the [six high-virulence] Salmonella serotypes of public health significance," the product will be considered "adulterated" and barred from being sold. The rule also would require chicken processing establishments to "incorporate statistical process control monitoring principles into microbial monitoring programs."
If "statistical process control monitoring" sounds more like something you might see inside an Amazon warehouse than on a farm, welcome to 21st century American agriculture. In its benevolence, the USDA offers small meat processors "access to laboratory services" provided by FSIS, as well as a 3-year grace period to implement the changes (instead of the 1-year period for large establishments). But the compliance costs and headaches for small processors and farmers run much deeper than these modest accommodations.
Small processors and farmers are symbiotic partners in the larger ecosystem of the poultry industry, which is notorious for its vertical integration and the dominance of a few megacorporations, such as Tyson and Perdue. Unsurprisingly, "Big Chicken" companies like Tyson and Perdue support USDA's new rule, since they are able to afford the costs of partnering with sophisticated compliance companies that specialize in "Poultry Integrator Compliance-Readiness Programs" whose "lab robotics" and "artificial intelligence algorithms" will ensure adherence to the regulations.
Meanwhile, non-algorithmic farms and processors are hitting the panic button. "The larger, integrated facilities will be able to find ways to meet these regulations," said Charles Ryan Wilson, owner of Common Wealth Poultry in Maine, in an interview with Successful Farming. "That won't be available to the smaller processors and producers." Wilson points out that larger operations have the resources to afford real-time vaccines or mitigation strategies like chemically treating poultry to either make salmonella-positive birds safe or repurpose the meat for other products.
For smaller processors, the options are more limited. "Our farmers and our processors cannot handle that chaos where a larger outfit absolutely can," Kristen Kilfoyle Boffo of Walden Local Meat told Successful Farming. "If [the larger companies] get a salmonella positive, they're just going to waterbath chill those birds and then 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. But for us, we'd be dead in the water."
In turn, smaller processors could become so concerned about potential liability that they may simply stop accepting chickens and turkeys from small farms altogether. And even if more processors onboard mitigation protocols like chemical bathing of salmonella-positive poultry, this would not necessarily be a public policy win. As the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance notes, "USDA's approach to salmonella has created a culture of chemical dependency, in which processors are incentivized to use more and harsher chemicals in an effort to produce a sterile final product."
While producers and processors alike recognize the importance of reducing salmonella illnesses, there are ways to make the rules more narrowly tailored. For example, the agency could develop a "safe harbor" for small-sized poultry farms and processors, under which these operations would be considered in compliance with the new rule so long as they followed a predetermined set of slimmed-down (and more feasible) safety protocols.
But the best answer of all would be to look to another link in the chicken supply chain: the consumer. In the event one purchases a salmonella-positive chicken or turkey—such samples hover at slightly under 10 percent of all birds—one simply needs to cook it at a proper temperature to make it safe for human consumption.
Here is where the bigger problem comes in. Not only are many cooks uneducated about cooking temperatures, but research suggests that about a quarter of all home cooks cross-contaminate other food dishes they are preparing with raw chicken—and 40 percent neglect to wash their hands after handling raw chicken. Fortunately, there also is evidence that if consumers are given simple warnings and instructions about how to properly handle and cook raw poultry, they are quick to rectify their unsafe cooking habits.
If the USDA wants to crack down on salmonella, it could look to producing simple, easy-to-understand educational information on how to prepare chicken safely. Doing so would empower more Americans to protect themselves from disease while helping save the dwindling number of small businesses left in the American agricultural landscape.
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