Living Our Principles: Process
At Jennie-O Turkey Store’s feed mills, even a sunflower shell doesn’t go to waste.
Through partnerships with manufacturers and other companies in the Minnesota and Wisconsin area, the company reuses materials such as sunflower hulls, wood shavings and oat hulls to produce feed and bedding for our turkeys. In total, we use 49 ingredients in our feed from 83 suppliers. Here’s a list of some of our ingredients:
What we buy:
- Sunflower hulls: bought from other companies and reused as a bedding source and later as a fertilizer
- Wood shavings: by-products from other manufacturing processes, including window manufacturers and lumberyards
- Oat hulls: bought from oat manufacturers and reused as a bedding source
- Soybean meal: bought from manufacturers after extract of oil and used in feed as a source of protein
- Bakery meal: used in feed
- Distillers dried grains: by-products of ethanol industry used in feed
- Meat and bone meal: by-product of processing plants used in feed
What we sell:
- Egg shells: sold to other manufacturers for rendering and use in fertilizer
- Turkey litter: sold to a power plant to use as a source of energy and sold as organic fertilizer
- Ash: from burning turkey litter, ash is sold to a manufacturer to reuse as a fertilizer
- Animal fat: sold as biodiesel fuel
By reusing and recycling these by-products, materials are kept out of the landfill and new products are produced. It’s a cycle that benefits everyone.
At Jennie-O Turkey Store, we are proud of our five veterinarians that spend the majority of their time out in the field and have developed a personal relationship with the farmers. As regular visitors to company-owned and labor-equity farms—as much as 2-5 days per workweek are spent on the farm—our staff veterinarians have one-on-one interaction with the farmers and livestock, allowing them to effectively monitor the animals and offer more knowledgeable follow-up treatment to maintain the health of the animals.
This personal attention also helps educate farmers on ways to improve the health of the livestock and more efficiently monitor the animals. Another example of the important role veterinarians play at Hormel Foods can be seen at Clougherty Packing Company where two licensed veterinarians’ responsibilities include overseeing the company-owned hog farms and the procurement and the delivery of healthy, high-quality livestock from selected suppliers as well as overseeing the live production and feed mill facilities for the farms, which are located in California, Arizona and Wyoming. In addition, the staff veterinarian for the hog farm operations works directly with the production management teams in each location to oversee all preventive and diagnostic medicine activities, veterinary care and health assurance programs for the company.
View our 2009 Hormel Foods Corporate Responsibility Report for additional stories about how we are living our principles.