SC’s Amick Farms chicken plant fire could impact supply chain, future for workers unknown
The blaze raged through the night and into the dawn.
“We were having our church service Sunday morning and they were still fighting the fire,” Brenda Cockrell said.
Cockrell attends Amick Grove Pentecostal Holiness Church, where a modest congregation of around two dozen worship across the street from the Amick Farms chicken plant, which sits along a rural stretch of road in Saluda County. The plant caught fire Saturday night, Jan. 25, with more than 75 firefighters from five agencies across the Midlands responding. Work to put out the fire and stabilize the site continued through the late afternoon Sunday.
The ramifications from the blaze are likely to stretch on for a while longer.
The fire damaged more than 10,000 square feet of production space at the plant, which was founded in the area in 1941 and is the largest employer in Saluda County and the Batesburg-Leesville area, just to the west of Lexington County and the Midlands’ larger population centers.
Amick Farms officials anticipate it could take more than a year to fully recover, which could cause significant delays to food supply chains across the country. The company produces 1.4 billion pounds of chicken products each year, according to its website. Its three poultry production facilities, including others in Maryland and Mississippi, work with 500 farming partners across three states.
“The impact on growers, that’ll trickle down from truckers and transportation to feed mills … that supply chain really gets knocked around with things like this because [Amick Farms] processes so many chickens a day,” said Batesburg-Leesville Mayor Lancer Shull.
The economic impact will be felt throughout the area, said Jim Moore, the chairman of the Saluda County Council.
“Saluda County will do all we can to get Amick Farms back up and running. They are a major employer of our residents and one of the few industries we have in the county, not only at the facility but many of our local farmers raise chickens for them,” Moore said.
According to the state Department of Commerce, the company employs more than 1,000 people in South Carolina. On its website, Amick Farms claims more than 3,500 team members company wide.
The company told workers, via social media, Thursday it had established a pay plan for employees of the plant beginning Feb. 2. Employees were instructed to contact the company’s human resource department. A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for more information from The State.
As the plant picks up the pieces from the massive fire, at least one poultry processing plant in South Carolina has stepped in to help assist Amick Farms. House of Raeford, a company with processing locations in Williamsburg County, Greenville and West Columbia, will add additional hours to its schedule to allow for processing birds from Amick’s partner farms.
“We had other companies support us when we faced similar situations in the past, and it is simply a good thing to do for our neighbor,” a spokesperson from House of Raeford said in an email to The State.
Aside from House of Raeford and Amick Farms, South Carolina has at least two other large poultry processing plants — Perdue Foods in Dillon and Pilgrim’s Pride in Sumter. A spokesperson for Perdue declined to comment on whether the company was offering assistance to Amick in the wake of the fire. A call to Pilgrim’s Pride was not immediately returned.
It’s not clear what will happen to the employees at the Batesburg-Leesville plant. The company will pay its workers for the full work week through Jan. 31, it announced on social media Jan. 27. Amick Farms told sanitation and night shift workers to not report to the plant Jan. 28 and day shift employees to not report Jan. 29.
“We hope to be able to provide more information to our team members soon,” the plant said on Facebook, in response to a worker asking about whether he needed to look for a new job.
In the event of mass layoffs or furloughs, companies with more than 100 employees are required by law to provide a 60-day notice, or less in the event of an unforeseeable business event or natural disaster, ahead of mass layoffs or closures through the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The company had not filed a notice as of Wednesday afternoon, the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce confirmed.
Fire crews from Batesburg-Leesville, Aiken, Lexington, Newberry and Greenwood arrived at the chicken plant at 9:30 p.m. Jan. 25 and didn’t clear the scene until 4:20 p.m. the next day, the Saluda County Emergency Management Division posted to Facebook.
“We don’t have an exact cause, but it was an accidental fire,” Saluda County Emergency Management Director Josh Morton told The State.
Morton said the fire was among the worst he’s seen in his 13 years with the county, along with a large fire that took place two years ago at a different plant. On Thanksgiving Day in 2022, Valley Proteins, a rendering and animal processing plant in the area, caught fire. That plant was significantly smaller than Amick Farms, employing around 160 people.
This story was originally published January 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "SC’s Amick Farms chicken plant fire could impact supply chain, future for workers unknown."
