How Costco’s Fremont Poultry Facility Protects Local Groundwater
Lincoln Premium Poultry’s feed mill.
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ostco is known and loved for its $5 rotisserie chickens. In order to better provide this popular item, Costco has recently moved beyond simply supplying chickens to actually raising them. To do this, it established an enormous chicken operation— including a hatchery, a feed mill, a processing facility, and a network of local farmers who raise the poultry—in and around Fremont, Nebraska. It will eventually produce 2 million chickens a week. With such a large facility coming into the area, some locals were concerned about issues including the amount of chicken litter, or manure, that the poultry would create and its potential effects on groundwater. In this interview, Jessica Kolterman of Lincoln Premium Poultry, the company formed by Costco to manage its facility, explains how it worked with the State of Nebraska to establish stringent guidelines to make sure that the chicken litter was disposed of in an environmentally safe manner. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about Lincoln Premium Poultry. Jessica Kolterman: Lincoln Premium Poultry is a company that was formed by Costco to manage the poultry operations of its new facility. Our team was built to accommodate
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Costco’s goals and objectives, which were to create a food processing facility for chicken, a feed mill, and a hatchery, and then to develop a network of farmers here in Nebraska to raise the poultry. We are working with 80–100 farms. We refer to the combination of the hatchery, the feed mill, the processing facility, and all the farms that are associated with those facilities as a complex. Irrigation Leader: How large are the new facilities? Jessica Kolterman: The food processing facility is about 400,000 square feet and the hatchery is about 90,000 square feet. The feed mill produces enough feed to haul out to all our farms in the region. Irrigation Leader: Were there any concerns about the effects that this increase in poultry production would have on groundwater? Jessica Kolterman: There were concerns about the volume of chicken litter that the new poultry would create. People who are not associated with farms may not realize how much fertilizer is currently being used on farms or understand the regulations that govern that use. In reality, quite a bit of cattle manure and hog manure is already being used as fertilizer across Nebraska. Chicken litter shouldn’t be looked at any differently. We worked hard to set a high standard in order to mitigate these concerns. Irrigation Leader: Were there any legal regulations that regulated how you disposed of that litter?
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LINCOLN PREMIUM POULTRY.
Jessica Kolterman: I came to the Lincoln Premium Poultry team by way of working for the State of Nebraska. I was working for the Nebraska Department of Agriculture on a temporary assignment with the goal of recruiting this project to the state. After we had achieved that goal, the company hired me to work on implementing the project.
Lincoln Premium Poultry’s process plant.
