-November 19,2019-
Sanger-based Pitman Farms is expanding again in Kings County. The poultry producer who has a 110 acre feed mill in Hanford has applied to the county for a permit for a 1 million head chicken ranch near Hanford, expanding the existing facility from its current current limit of 170,00 head.
The ranch with a 6X turnover rate annually would produce about 6 million chickens a year. In 2018 Kings County saw a doubling of the number of head from around 9 million to 16 million birds. That trend appear to be continuing into 2020.
The project includes the demolition of the existing eight poultry barns and construction of 918,000 square feet of new poultry barns, totaling 34 structures, that would be 54’-0’’ wide and 500’-0’’ in length. The new poultry barns would be built in two phases along with three additional single-family farm employee residences for caretaker purposes.
In the news recently Pitman was bidding on the former Zacky Farms ranches out of bankruptcy including some in Kings County. But rival Foster Farms won out. Still Pitman is not letting this slow them down.
Both the world and the US are eating more chicken with the latest USDA projection for chicken consumption at 112 lbs per capita in the US, up from 60 lbs in 1960. Chicken consumption here is double beef or pork.
On the world stage China, hungry for protein despite the trade war and looks to import more US meat. The Wall Street Journal just reported that China would reopen their market to US chicken, on hold since 2015 after the avian influenza incident. Opening trade to China could mean an uptick of a U.S. industry sales of about $2 billion of poultry says the newspaper.
Tops on China’s menu are chicken paws or chicken feet – popular in Asia but not sold widely the US.
One news source says “75 percent of China’s annual chicken imports are made up solely of feet (or paws, as they’re known in the poultry industry). Most of those chicken feet once came from the world’s biggest chicken producer: the United States. But despite the massive demand, fraught international trade politics means that the epic flow of chicken feet to China has slowed to a trickle.”
Pitman has ben expanding outside California in recent years as they face other national poultry competitors. Last year they bought Norbest in Utah. In the Central Valley they have been expanding both their free-range poultry growing as well as their not free range ranches in Kings and Tulare Counties. The permit for this ranch does not appear to offer chickens a chance to leave the barn.