"Perdue Farms Eliminated Antibiotics From Chicken Supply"

"NEW YORK — Perdue Farms Inc. eliminated all antibiotics from its chicken supply, the company’s chairman said, in a move he said makes the Maryland company the first major poultry supplier to do so.

Perdue’s move completes 14 years of efforts to replace antibiotics with vaccines and re-engineered chicken barns, and could help the company ramp up production of organic chicken, a market that is growing far faster than that for conventional poultry.

“It completes the journey,” Perdue Chairman Jim Perdue said in an interview Thursday at the WSJ Global Food Forum in New York.

Perdue’s campaign to stop using antibiotics to raise the roughly 13 million chickens the Salisbury, Md., company processes each week follows concerns raised by U.S. and international health officials about the widespread use of antibiotics in both human and animal medicine."

Jacob Bunge reports for the Wall Street Journal October 6, 2016.