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Iowa House subcommittee passes poultry processing bill

A bill in the Iowa House would help increase processing opportunities for small-scale poultry processors and producers.

Iowa Ag Secretary Mike Naig proposed the legislation and tells Brownfield it would allow poultry establishments to perform official inspected and custom-exempt processing at the same facility.

“If you’re an official red meat locker, you can do both official and custom, meaning that somebody can bring in an animal and take it home for home use,” Naig said, “But you can’t do that on the poultry side, and it has to do with how federal law is currently being interpreted.”

He says the availability of processors has been a challenge across the state. “There’s many challenges in trying to bring more small-scale poultry processing to the state, labor being one of them,” he said. “But for those that already are here, and there’s about a dozen that do some level of poultry processing, it seems silly that they can’t have the same treatment as the red meat side of the house.”

Naig says some producers have been traveling hundreds of miles to neighboring states to have their birds processed.

The bill passed unanimously through a House subcommittee on Thursday and is now eligible for full consideration by the House Ag Committee. A companion bill was recently introduced in the Iowa Senate.