Feb. 22—A company with three facilities in Decatur oversees the production of chicken meat from the birds' birth through early stages of the cooking process and is Morgan County's largest employer with about 1,640 workers.

Officials with Wayne-Sanderson Farms on Plugs Road in Decatur said the company employs about 540 workers at its fresh operations plant where close to 130,000 chickens daily are slaughtered and disassembled. About 60% of their product goes to the company's prepared food facility across the street and the rest is sold to other processors.

Another 1,100 workers at the two prepared food facilities make products that are pre-cooked and ready for the final stages of preparation, providing some of the chicken used in restaurants such as Olive Garden, Hardee's, Red Lobster and LongHorn Steakhouse as well as products sold in grocery stores.

Cory Early, the North Alabama area complex manager, said employment, technology and innovation at the Decatur facilities are keeping up with consumer demand.

"We slaughter about 650,000 9 1/2 -pound birds a week," he said. "We'll have a quarter-million pounds of fresh meat a day come out of the fresh operations plant."

After a megamerger in August 2021, Wayne-Sanderson became the third-largest poultry processor in the nation behind Tyson and Cargill, according to the company's website. Wayne-Sanderson now has about 26,000 employees nationwide. At maximum capacity, Wayne-Sanderson's operations in Decatur employ about 1,900 workers, a company spokesman said.

Steps in production process

Wayne-Sanderson contracts with chicken growers across the state. Day-old chicks are feather sexed, which is important because male chickens are processed at north Alabama facilities, including one in Albertville.

The chicks with longer or varying-size feathers are female and those with feathers about the same size are usually male. Early said company trucks will meet with trucks from south Alabama in Sylacauga to swap the males and females.

The chicks are then sent to chicken farms. Company spokesman Frank Singleton said the company provides the chicks, feed and veterinary care, while the growers provide housing and utilities to raise the chickens. About 60% to 70% of chickens processed in Decatur come from locally owned growers, Singleton said.

He said there are 85 chicken farmers in Morgan, Limestone and Lawrence counties under contract with Wayne-Sanderson Farms. The company's Albertville facility has another 75 chicken farmers under contract.

"Our field reps make weekly visits to the farms and our contractors will pick up birds once a week," Early said.

He said about seven chicken catchers will load about 3,780 chickens, or about 80,000 pounds, per truck. He said it takes about 30 minutes for a crew to catch the chickens in a large 66-by-600-foot chicken house.

Once the truck arrives at the fresh operations plant, "it takes about 30 to 40 minutes to slaughter a load of chickens," he said. "They might be here for one or two hours before they are slaughtered."

Early said usually fewer than 10 chickens a day have died prior to their arrival at the plant.

Singleton said the U.S. Department of Agriculture monitors the slaughtering process.

"There are strict rules on how the birds are handled," Singleton said.

Early said the processors are judged on the number of bruised legs and broken wings. "The catchers are held to a high standard, too," he said. He said the Decatur fresh operation plant slaughters 16 hours a day. A third shift maintains and sanitizes the machines and buildings.

"We try to process 130,000 birds a day," he said. "We do about 35 loads of live chickens a day. We'll have six or seven live-haul drivers (per day), and two drivers might haul one farm. It depends on the size of the farm. They might start catching another farm before finishing the day."

Singleton said chickens are unloaded off the truck and carried on a conveyor belt through a water trough that has an electrical current. The birds are stunned and then their throats are slit.

"The controlled stunning is the industry standard and is as humane as it can be. Ninety percent of the processors in the United States use it," Singleton said.

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Feather removal

The dead chickens are then placed in heated water to make the feathers come off. He said the water is usually 100 degrees going into the chiller and about 40 degrees when the process concludes.

"Then we have a machine with rubber fingers that will spin at a high speed. It looks like a carwash tunnel. It will remove the feathers, all of the feathers," Early said. The heads and entrails of the birds are removed by machines and the birds will go through multiple rinses.

Then the disassembling of the chicken continues with modern technological equipment that takes away some of the previously laborious work from employees. Singleton said most of the deboning is done by machines but because of different sizes about 200 employees per shift will work on deboning the chickens.

"Nothing can replace the precision of human work on deboning a bird, but between labor, efficiency and the volume of movement, more automation is where the industry is headed," Singleton said.

Company officials said automation and robotics have improved the industry "drastically" in the past five to 10 years.

"When a bird arrives at our facility, it is slaughtered, processed and in a box ready to cook in less than three hours," Early said.

The company has invested $37 million in the last two years on enlarging the fresh operations plant, automating the debone line and on equipment upgrades.

Across Plugs Road, Heath Loyd directs the prepared food operations. "The chicken comes out of this facility fully cooked and ready to eat," said the senior director of the prepared food business operations.

Loyd said the two plants' breaded, steam-cooked breaded, roasted, par-fried, strips, nuggets, popcorn, wings and roasted chicken totals about 3.5 million pounds a week.

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Pay rising

Company officials say the tight labor market affects Wayne-Sanderson's operations as well.

"Post-COVID we struggled six to eight months getting fully staffed," Loyd said. "We were about 100 short. We made the decision as a company to increase our pay rates over a two-year time period four times. We started seeing an uptick in our applicant pool."

Pay is $19 to $25 an hour now with a $1,500 sign-on bonus and benefits for line workers. Two years ago, it was $10 to $12 an hour, he said.

"We now have people from Athens, Madison, Huntsville coming to work for us. We've seen a lot of stability over the past year," Loyd said. "We're proud of the environment and culture we've created here."

He said Wayne-Sanderson in Decatur hires between five and 15 employees a week.

He said automation and the increased pay have been big drivers.

"Automation has helped us staff other critical parts of the business," Loyd said. "When we can eliminate an arduous task for an employee by placing robotic technology in the place, it helps everyone. Eliminating all of those repetitive high-risk type of jobs helps us with our aim for zero-accident culture."

Singleton, however, said automation has not decreased employment. "Nobody has lost positions with us because of the automation," he said. "Automation has filled some of the more difficult to fill jobs. Nobody was laid off, we simply moved them to another position within the facilities."

Loyd said the prepared food facility has the capacity to add another fully cooked line. "Our intention is to spread further into the retail sector of both fresh and prepared," he said. "Right now our retail segment in prepared food is less than 3% of our overall business. I expect employment to go up in the next three to five years."

He said he has been talking with the local county schools to point some students into the trades that will help them join Wayne-Sanderson.

"We're interested in getting those high school kids into a two-year program at a college," he said. "There are poultry programs at Wallace (Hanceville), Snead State and Evergreen in south Alabama."

The fresh operations facility is 71,800 square feet and was built in 1976 by the parent company Continental Grain. For the prepared food facilities, the 189,000-square-foot east facility was built in 1998 and the 204,262-square-foot west facility was constructed in 2005. A cold storage facility is 134,855 square feet.

In the past two years, the company has invested $66 million on upgrades to the facilities, officials said.

According to company data, total payroll of the three Decatur facilities is $58.8 million. Last year, Wayne-Sanderson paid $1.06 million in local property taxes and another $595,705 in business and sales taxes.

— mike.wetzel@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2442. Twitter @DD_Wetzel.