The CPF Winter Board meeting will be held at the Hyatt Regency Sacramento Wednesday, March 6th at 8:30 am. On Tuesday, March 5th, a wine and

hors d’oeuvres reception will be at the Citizen Hotel. A $200 per person contribution is needed to attend. Funds collected go the state or federal PAC.  Click here for more information regarding RSVPs and room reservations. 

Today, Foster Farms President and CEO Laura Flanagan announced a multi-million dollar capital investment project that will support an expansion and upgrade of the company’s poultry processing facility in Livingston.

The multi-million dollar investment will expand the facility’s product lines, which currently provide 2,032 jobs in Merced County. Additional jobs will be added as part of the expansion. Construction for the Foster Farms expansion project has already begun, with completion scheduled for September 2019. The expansion has been made possible by a $6.5 million economic incentive package, developed by state and local government leaders working in concert with Foster Farms executive staff.

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A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety in Griffin has developed a machine-learning approach that could lead to quicker identification of the animal source of certain Salmonella outbreaks.

In the research, published in the January 2019 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Xiangyu Deng and his colleagues used more than 1,000 genomes to predict the animal sources, especially livestock, of Salmonella Typhimurium.

Deng, an assistant professor of food microbiology at the center, and Shaokang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate with the center, led the project, which also included experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Translational Genomics Research Institute.  Read more

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking new steps to strengthen and modernize the process for issuing a public warning about a voluntary recall and for notification of recalls.

Most companies collaborate with the FDA to rapidly initiate voluntary recalls and work with their supply chain partners to remove the product from shelves to prevent further distribution. And in general, a recall occurs quickly when the problem is discovered. However, there are situations where the FDA may need to provide safety advice to marketplace to protect consumers. Read more

During the week of Jan. 25-31, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) confirmed 26 cases of virulent Newcastle disease in California’s Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.  APHIS also reported that an additional 84 cases were confirmed between Dec. 21, 2018, and Jan. 24, 2019. These detections occurred during the recent government shutdown, and while APHIS employees were responding to the detections during that time, the weekly update messages and updates to the APHIS website were not completed. The delayed updates include two commercial cases in Riverside County, Cal., and one case in backyard exhibition chickens in Utah County, Utah, which had been announced during the shutdown.  Read more

About 225 people jammed a Norco meeting hall Tuesday night, Feb. 5, to learn about a disease that has reached the town famous for its country, animal-keeping, lifestyle and poses a serious threat to the community’s chickens.

Since May, virulent Newcastle disease has spread to parts of Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Already, 1 million birds have been euthanized across Southern California, including 900,000 in commercial poultry operations and 100,000 in backyard flocks, said Robyn Corcoran, a veterinarian with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “There is no treatment for this virus,” Corcoran said. “And it is almost 100 percent fatal.”  Read more