SYLVESTER — A group of Southwest Wisconsin poultry producers was awarded a Value Added Producer Grant through the USDA Rural Development Program in September 2018, a planning grant with a 100 percent match. 

Several farmers in the four counties with poultry enterprises are finding economically viable marketing opportunities enabling them to grow their businesses. As they have learned to get product into more urban settings and have grown their production, it has necessitated crossing state lines. Southwest Wisconsin simply does not have enough people to eat all that producers create, which led to the need to figure out how to move product to where it is wanted. Access to processing with USDA certification is becoming a larger barrier to continued expansion of businesses.

Iowa County Extension Ag Educator Gene Schriefer has been helping to organize the producers. 

The producers raised nearly $24,000 from their own support and in local funds which leveraged a match of $24,000 from USDA to study the feasibility of locating a USDA processing facility in southwest Wisconsin. In order to accept the grant, a processing cooperative was created and filed with the State of Wisconsin. 

Use of the word poultry includes chickens, turkeys, waterfowl, guinea hens and rabbits, since they would all use similar equipment. The next steps are to develop a survey of current poultry operators and access the level of demand for processing and other services that a facility might be able to offer.

While the survey is underway, co-op members are looking at similar facilities across the Midwest and learning from their experiences to avoid mistakes where possible. 

More consumers are voting with their dollars, wanting to know where and how their food is produced. It’s important that their dollars end up in a farmer’s pocket rather than going to everyone but the farmer, who assumes all the risk. 

Contact the producers at 

driftlesspoultrycooperative@gmail.com or look for the group on Facebook.