News Room

Poultry litter is a valuable resource to the farm partners who raise our birds, and not a waste product. 

For many of our farm partners, the litter from their chicken houses is used as organic alternative to chemical crop fertilizers, and that use is regulated by nutrient management plans and applicable environmental regulations. 

Poultry houses are enclosed operations with dry litter and, unlike enclosed cattle or hog operations, do not produce wet manure and do not have "out flows."

On the Delmarva Peninsula, where the loss of farmland means some poultry farm partners need alternatives to land application, Perdue operates Perdue-AgriRecycle, the industry's first large-scale litter recycling plant. The plant, an over $30 million investment, opened in the spring of 2001, and by the end of 2009 had recycled or relocated more than a billion pounds of poultry litter, representing more than 100 million pounds of nutrients. During this time, over 50% of the finished product from Perdue AgriRecycle was relocated outside the Chesapeake Bay watershed.