SALEM — The Oregon Department of Agriculture wants lawmakers to change its authority, allowing it to give poultry producers more options under the state-inspected meat program.

Livestock producers who use state-inspected slaughter and processing facilities can sell meat at the wholesale and retail levels, similarly to USDA-inspected facilities, except the sales are limited to Oregon.

Currently, the program only applies to cattle, swine, sheep and goats due to the way ODA’s authority is described in state law, which Senate Bill 809 would alter to include poultry.

The revision is necessary under the agency’s agreement with USDA, under which state-inspected facilities must meet the same standards as their federal counterparts, said Paul Sherman, ODA’s state meat inspection program specialist.

Once the statute is amended, poultry will be included in the state meat inspection program without creating any fiscal impacts or requiring additional fees, and will only entail a minor amendment to regulations, according to ODA.

“It’s a very minimal change to our administrative rules to add that,” Sherman said during a recent legislative hearing.

Currently, state law allows the on-farm slaughter of up to 1,000 birds a year for direct sales to consumers. Poultry producers can also slaughter 20,000 birds a year at a state-licensed facility that’s not certified for federal equivalency.

It’s unlikely that poultry producers will rely on SB 809 to slaughter more birds, but the change will clear the way to sell such products as chicken pot pies that are processed through the state-inspected meat program, Sherman said.

Though the state-inspected meat program has equivalent standards to the federal government’s, processing facilities often find it’s easier to work with ODA than try to obtain USDA inspection, he said. “We’ve made a strong personal connection with small mom-and-pop operators.”

The ODA revived its state-inspected meat program in 2020 due to the supply chain bottlenecks that occurred after the COVID outbreak, said Jonathan Sandau, the agency’s deputy director. The program was previously discontinued in the 1970s due to budget constraints.

“We’ve really built that program back up over the years,” Sandau said.

If the bill is approved, Oregon will join more than 20 other states that include poultry in their state-inspected meat programs, he said. But because the change hasn’t yet been made, the ODA has so far directed four processing facilities to seek USDA inspection instead.

“We weren’t able to bring them into our program,” Sandau said.