Necessity prompts Michigan Turkey Producers to fill an abandoned plant with process innovations and state-of-the-art environmental controls
It's no exaggeration to say that, if the plant hadn't come on line nine months after growers purchased an abandoned food-processing building, a half-century of commercial turkey breeding in western Michigan might well have ended. The suspension of turkey slaughter at Bil Mar Foods in nearby Zeeland, Mich., in January 1999 left area turkey farmers with few options for profitably bringing their birds to market. Turkey production in Michigan nose-dived in 1999 as farmers went into a subsistence mode, divvying up short-term contracts to supply processors in Iowa and southwestern Indiana.