If you eat chicken — and we know that 75 percent of Americans do at least once a week — you’ve almost certainly eaten chicken from House of Raeford.
This North Carolina-based, family-owned company contracts with farmers in South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia to raise chickens. The chickens are processed at facilities near the farms. In our state, House of Raeford has operations in Greenville, Leesville, Hemingway and West Columbia and employs 1,335 South Carolinians. I’m proud to have them here.
House of Raeford plans to build a new South Carolina facility that will support 900 new jobs and nearly $200 million in capital investment. The new facility will supply almost half a billion pounds of South Carolina-raised poultry each year for grocery stores and restaurants.
House of Raeford’s new plant will support not only those who work in the facility, but farmers in the community as well. A new, more efficient facility will create additional demand for chickens. We estimate an additional 160 farmers will have the opportunity to grow chickens when the facility opens — that’s about 300 new poultry houses resulting in approximately $146 million in additional new investment. Those chickens have to eat, and the new plant will provide South Carolina farmers with new opportunities to grow tens of thousands more acres of corn and soybeans for feed annually.
I’m sorry the Aiken community will miss out on these new jobs and miss out on the pride that comes from supporting local farmers. Aiken County Council let their constituents down in failing to gather all the facts before making a decision that will affect their entire region. Kudos to the two council members who were willing to put things on hold and learn more about the project, which could have included accepting the offer to tour other House of Raeford facilities and engaging with Gov. Henry McMaster about expanding water and sewer capacity. I visited their newest facility in North Carolina a couple of years ago and you can’t tell it’s a poultry processing plant from outside of the building.
I’ve heard a lot of misinformation about this project, and I’m disappointed that council never provided an opportunity for the public to learn the facts and weigh the pros and cons.
However, other South Carolina communities are eager to have House of Raeford build a state-of-the-art facility in their area. The focus now is to find a better alternative than Aiken and keep them on our side of the Savannah River and not lose this opportunity to Georgia.
As South Carolina’s population continues to grow at a rapid rate, these are the kinds of conversations we’re going to have to have. We can’t just house people here; we’ve got to feed them, too. And nobody gets fed without farmers.
Raising and processing food locally is good for South Carolina’s economy, environment and health. As we learned during the pandemic, a decentralized food system is a more resilient one.
Developing local agriculture, local processing and local supply chains is also important for national security. The more food we grow here, the less we have to depend on other countries. Food security, including chickens, is national security.
South Carolina’s agriculture industry is made up of thousands of farms and locally run companies just like House of Raeford. I’m proud to support them all.
