Dr. Bruce Stewart-Brown, senior vice president of food safety and quality at Perdue Farms, said achieving antibiotic-free chicken production is a process, and one that has taken Perdue 12 years of concentrated effort. That statement was part of a panel discussion held January 27 on antibiotic-free chicken production sponsored by DuPont at IPPE 2015.
“We’ve learned a lot of things,” said Stewart-Brown. “For example, you must have clean eggs in hatchery. We had to clean hatcheries better, had to step up sanitation and use a stricter approach as it related to personnel and procedures. I think the hatchery piece was the most significant to work through, but in the end, all that cleaning and sanitation had positive side benefits in regards to chick quality.”
Other speakers on the panel included Richard Kottmeyer, founder and managing director of Strategic; Dr. Gregory Siragusa, senior principal scientist of microbiology at Danisco/DuPont; and Dr. Steven Collett, clinical associate professor at the University of Georgia. The discussion was moderated by Terrence O’Keefe, WATT Global Media’s content director of agribusiness.
