COVID-19 has Prestage rethinking new turkey plant design

Prestage Farms has been exploring the idea of building a new turkey processing plant in South Carolina for several years now, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is rethinking the plant’s design.

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Ron Prestage (National Pork Producers Council)
Ron Prestage (National Pork Producers Council)

Prestage Farms has been exploring the idea of building a new turkey processing plant in South Carolina for several years now, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is rethinking plant designs.

Ron Prestage, president of Prestage Farms, on December 10 talked about the ways the pandemic has impacted business while speaking during the Iowa Farm Bureau Annual Meeting Webinar Series.

“If you’ve got the luxury of building a new facility, you better think about the challenges and the lessons learned from this COVID pandemic, of the things you can do to better protect your workers,” said Prestage.

Prestage Farms’ newest plant is a pork processing facility, which opened in 2019 in Eagle Grove, Iowa. And as Prestage Farms examines a potential turkey plant in South Carolina, it will consider factors it hadn’t thought of when building the plant in Iowa.

“This pandemic has absolutely changed the model that I want for the design of that plant,” he said. “This pandemic may come to an end, and let’s all pray that it does, (but) it does not mean that there will not be another one behind it.”

Since the pandemic began, the situation of worker shortages has been amplified. Prestage said “extreme automation,” now must be considered. He also believes it is wise to “literally build the plant to take advantage of social distancing everywhere that you can.”

He also noted that things as basic as how restrooms are constructed must be considered. He cited the example of how restrooms are constructed at airports. There are no doors at those airports, but rather a series of walls and turns that offer a hands-off entry that prevents people from being able to see inside.

When the Eagle Grove plant was built, the company used of fingerprint reading technology for worker identification when entering areas, clocking in and out, and even paying for lunches at the cafeteria. But with additional sanitation concerns because of the pandemic, that technology no longer seems like the best option to use.

He said even though facial recognition systems are more expensive, it is a wiser alternative.

Headquartered in Clinton, North Carolina, Prestage Farms is a vertically integrated pork and turkey processor with operations in operations in Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina. It is the 16th largest turkey producer in the United States, having slaughtered 140 million pounds of live turkeys in 2019.

View our continuing coverage of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

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