ITHACA, N.Y. — 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?

This new self-paced online course from the Cornell Small Farms Program 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. While the food safety concepts transcend state lines, the regulations mentioned in this course are NYS-specific.

The course will take 3-4 hrs 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 the Cornell Small Farms Program’s 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. You can browse all of the course offerings online.

–Cornell Small Farms Program