New Self-Paced On-Farm Poultry Processing Course Available
Amy Barkley, Team Leader & Livestock Specialist
Southwest New York Dairy, Livestock and Field Crops Program
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.
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Partners from New York State Dept. of Labor, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Southern Tier West, and Workforce Development will be in the space to provide an overview of the new program, discuss the roles of hosts and apprentices, review the benefits of hosting an apprentice, and setting the vision for building a corps of highly skilled, modern trained Butchers and validating this career as a skilled trade with respectful earning potential.
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October 15, 2025 : Optimizing the Economic Return of Pasture-Raised Slow-Growth and Conventional Broilers - Webinar
Over the past three years, Cornell Cooperative Extension has worked with nearly 40 small farmers across NYS to gather information on the true costs of raising broilers (meat chickens) on pasture. This presentation is a summary of the findings of this research project.
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