New Self-Paced On-Farm Poultry Processing Course Available

March 1, 2021/Erica Frenay

Has your insurance provider told you they won’t underwrite your on-farm processing of poultry unless you complete a training? Do you need to brush up on best practices for processing meat birds on-farm?

Our new self-paced online course offers detailed videos and lessons on food safety and humane techniques for dispatching and processing chickens and turkeys on-farm under the 1000-bird exemption.

The On-Farm Poultry Processing course will take 3-4 hours to complete, and includes quizzes in each section to test your knowledge. You’ll have 3 attempts to score 80% or better on each quiz before you can move onto the next topic, and if you pass all of the quizzes, a “Certificate of Completion” will be automatically issued to you.

This certificate may be accepted by your insurer to underwrite your poultry operation, but we cannot guarantee that it will result in coverage. Please confirm with your insurance agent before registering, if your sole intent in taking the course is to obtain farm insurance.

As with all of our online courses, pricing is tiered based on household income and this course ranges from $49 – $99. This On-Farm Poultry Processing course was authored by Cornell Cooperative Extension educator and farmer, Lynn Bliven, from Allegany County.

This new self-paced course joins our program’s offering of more than 20 online courses to help farmers improve their technical and business skills. These courses cover a range of topics any farmer needs to succeed, such as farm business, soil health, indoor mushroom production, grazing management, and so much more. You can browse all of our course offerings on our website.

Erica Frenay

Erica has had several different roles with the Small Farms Program since she began working there in 2005. In 2006 she co-founded the Northeast Beginning Farmer Project, and launched the first online course in 2007. For 10 years she facilitated and organized the Beginning Farmer Learning Network, a professional development network for service providers in the Northeast who support beginning farmers. She has shepherded the development, publishing, and updating of several key SFP publications, like the Guide to Farming in NYS, the On-Farm Poultry Processing Guide, and the Guide to Direct Marketing Livestock and Poultry. As the SFP’s menu of online courses surpassed 20, she shifted her role primarily to managing these courses, providing ongoing training to instructors, and ensuring a high quality experience for students.
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