A California-based poultry company that recently took over a closed Louisiana processing plant with assistance from the state says it will not extend contracts to all of the plant’s former growers. Foster Farms agreed to buy the shuttered Pilgrim’s Pride poultry processing plant in Farmerville for $80 million, with the state contributing $50 million of the purchase price and another $10 million for equipment upgrades.
The company’s director of marketing services, Ira Brill, says independent growers had been providing chickens to the Farmerville plant and another now-shuttered Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Clinton, Ark. “As Foster Farms brings the Farmerville plant up to full capacity, it expects to extend contracts to the vast majority of Louisiana growers, but the regrettable fact is that this single plant cannot fully accommodate a grower base that was previously supplying two plants,” Brill says.
Brill says Foster Farms, which planned to spend about $18 million annually on chickens, would use such factors as cost, the quality of chicken housing and distance from a feed mill and the processing plant in its decision to extend grower contracts. Foster Farms plans to begin operations at the Farmerville plant on July 16. The company says total employment was projected to exceed 1,100 by September, with the payroll eventually hitting 1,300 again.
