About 25,000 chickens being raised for Fieldale Farms were lost in a recent fire in Habersham County, Georgia.
According to a report from Now Habersham, officials believe the fire, which consumed a 500-foot-long barn, could have been caused by an electrical problem. The location of the fire was northwest of the town of Clarkesville.
The damages to the chicken barn were estimated to be between $200,000 and $250,000, while the chickens lost were estimated to be worth about $75,000. There was no mention of any injuries to people in the report.
The poultry barn fire incident occurred only about a month after another fire disrupted Fieldale Farms’ operations. On November 26, emergency personnel responded to a report of a fire at Fieldale Farms’ feed mill in Baldwin, Georgia. In that instance, a “flash fire” apparently happened, charring some soybeans at the top of a silo. Damages were minimal. That same feed mill was the location of an explosion in 2017 which caused structural damage to the feed mill as well as injuries to one person.
Fieldale Farms, according to the WATTPoultry.com Top Companies Database, operates two slaughter plants, one further processing plant, two feed mills and three hatcheries. The company processed 16.3 million pounds of ready to cook chicken on a weekly basis in 2020 and ranks as the 15th largest broiler producer in the United States.
Fieldale Farms also topped Feed Strategy’s Companies to Watch list. The Feed Strategy Top Companies list includes all feed producers globally that produce 1 million or more metric tons of feed annually. The Companies to Watch list includes all companies in the world that produce 800,000 metric tons of feed or more, but don’t quite reach the million-metric-ton mark.
Fieldale Farms, within the past year, produced 950,000 metric tons of feed last year.
