The Farmer Focus Way – The Right Way
You hear a lot from Farmer Focus about the 60 farm families that raise our chicken. You don’t often hear about the more than 480 team members working to bring delicious chicken to your dinner table. Today, we want to celebrate the accomplishments of those team members and give special recognition to members of the Heatwole and Prieto Rodriguez families who have been with Farmer Focus since our founding in 2014.
This past year brought a flood of people to grocery stores, allowing more people to discover Farmer Focus than ever before. Despite all of our new customers our production facility never operated under a line speed waiver. That allowed us to continue focusing on the things that matter; worker welfare and bringing high quality chicken to dinner tables. That focus brought home the WorkSafe Award for the 3rd consecutive year, achieving a Total Recordable Injury Rate of .90, well below the industry standard of 3.5. Our team only saw 4 OSHA recordable injuries for all of 2020 and passed 3 Million work hours without a lost-day injury. Despite one of the most challenging years on record, we’re proud of our team members for setting the bar so high.
At Farmer Focus our team’s welfare always takes priority and our COVID response came earlier than most because of that. In early February of 2020 Farmer Focus took steps to prepare for what would become known as COVID-19. Our initial written plan was finalized on February 29th and by March 2nd we had a COVID Response Team in place putting that plan into action. That preparation and the continued diligence from our team members led to the percentage of COVID positive cases in our production facility remaining at or below the percentage of cases in Virginia throughout the pandemic. We still saw a limited number of cases coming from outside, but there was only a single case of community spread in our non-production facilities, traced back to a member of our non-essential workforce. While we’re proud of the work we’ve done containing COVID to date, we’re all ready to move beyond this. To quicken vaccination efforts at Farmer Focus and ensure no team members lose pay, we are supporting on site vaccination for all team members that choose to get vaccinated. We plan to continue operating under our COVID-19 guidelines until we can ensure the safety of every employee.
At Farmer Focus we’re about doing things the right way; for farmers, their birds, and our planet. That takes the commitment of every employee and we couldn’t have asked for a better team to get us through this moment.
Erik Vaughan,
SVO President and Chief Operating Officer
