It was on the golf course during the Chicken Marketing Summit in Braselton, Ga., early last week that I learned from my playing partner, a seller with Amick Farms, that the industry’s years-long efforts to breed out woody breast has resulted in a decrease in egg hatchability rates. This wasn’t just a random comment out of nowhere; after all, the going theme in a lot of conversations at the event was around inflation and other causes of high prices and supply constraints.

No doubt that an important part of attending industry events like this is just being there in person, simply having a presence to let the hosts and others know that it matters to you. Some of it is just fun, too; and surely your coworkers back home might roll their eyes at the thought of you “working” on a golf course all day. But to us, tasked with relaying industry information to its professionals, those little nuggets of knowledge ultimately are what make it more than worth the price of admission.

I might have learned that woody breast tidbit another way, but the fact is I learned it this way — by being there — and who knows, this might be the seed of new some new content for us in the coming months.

Little did my foursome, or anyone else with whom I had conversations at the event, know that I was withholding some juicy embargoed information, which was also the result of “being there.”

The news item we broke, thanks to the initiative of managing editor Peter Ricci, early Monday morning on USDA declaring salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products and the exclusive interview that followed it were the yield of some fertile ground in Des Moines, Iowa.

I had attended the American Meat Science Association’s Reciprocal Meat Conference there in June. Part of a lively and constructive panel discussion on salmonella was Dr. J Emilio Esteban, USDA’s chief scientist, whose candor and humor was a hit with the audience. I relayed to Peter later that we should see about interviewing him for the magazine.

Turned out, he wasn’t available, but in a better stroke of luck, the agency offered an exclusive interview with Sandra Eskin, the agency's deputy under secretary for food safety. And in another great stroke of fortune, they tipped us off to the adulterant declaration, information also given early to only the Associated Press and the USDA’s own Radio Line.

I use words like “luck” and “fortune,” and surely the aforementioned anecdotes are apt examples of those words. But, as they say, you make your own luck; you make the effort to go. You pay the price of admission, the cost of travel. You work to get a favorable return on that investment.

Ok, now off to San Diego. And not to get a tan.

Travel budgets be damned

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