In May 2016, I urged you to pressure poultry giant Sanderson Farms to come to its senses and join other major poultry producers in taking proactive steps to reduce its antibiotic use. Remarkably, the company not only decided not to reduce its usage but also took the step of going public with its decision to continue using antibiotics, saying the antibiotic-free chicken trend is nothing but a marketing ploy devised to justify higher prices.

According to Lampkin Butts, president and chief operating officer of Sanderson Farms, “There is not any credible science that leads us to believe we’re causing antibiotic resistance in humans.”¹ Yet, when the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) conducted an analysis of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) testing for multidrug-resistant E. coli on Sanderson Farms’ chicken, they found otherwise.

Sanderson Farms’ Refusal to Cut Antibiotics in Chicken Is Dangerous

Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are used by industrial agriculture for purposes of growth promotion and preventing diseases that would otherwise make their concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) unviable. With animals packed into tight quarters, fed unnatural diets and living in filth, disease flourishes. Low doses of antibiotics are added to feed as a matter of course, not only to stave off inevitable infectious diseases but also because they cause the animals to grow faster on less food.

“But there is a terrifying downside to this practice,” Scientific American reported. “Antibiotics seem to be transforming innocent farm animals into disease factories.”² The antibiotics may kill most of the bacteria in the animal, but remaining resistant bacteria is allowed to survive and multiply. When the FDA tests raw supermarket chicken, they routinely find antibiotic-resistant bacteria to be present. According to NRDC’s analysis of FDA data, this is also true of Sanderson Farms’ chicken:³

“[W]e graph[ed] FDA’s testing results for multidrug-resistant E. coli found on retail chicken and Sanderson Farms chicken from 2002 to 2014 … the graph shows that E. coli isolated from Sanderson Farms’ chicken had levels of multidrug-resistance that were similar to E. coli from all retail chicken tested.

While FDA’s limited sample size makes it impossible to estimate national resistance rates with statistical confidence, it does provide evidence that Sanderson Farms chicken is indeed part of the problem and is contributing to the spread of antibiotic resistance (in addition to spreading E. coli, which can be harmful).”