Lt. Gov. Beckwith visits Jasper's Farbest Foods, highlights local turkey industry
Farbest Foods says it processes nearly 15 million turkeys a year, and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s Jasper stop put that scale and its local jobs on display.
A Jasper turkey processor that handles nearly 15 million live birds a year and ships as much as two million pounds of fresh and frozen product daily drew Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith into Dubois County, putting Farbest Foods’ workforce and farm supply chain at the center of the visit.
Farbest Foods says it is headquartered in Jasper and ranks among the largest turkey companies in the United States by volume. The company says it operates two USDA-inspected processing plants, in Huntingburg and Vincennes, and uses more than 400,000 square feet across those plants and two distribution centers. Farbest says its total live production surpasses 600 million live pounds annually and that the organization includes about 1,350 employees.
Beckwith’s visit carried added weight because of the offices he holds. The lieutenant governor serves as president of the Indiana Senate and oversees the Indiana State Department of Agriculture and the Office of Community and Rural Affairs, agencies tied directly to the kinds of policy, funding and rural development questions that can affect an operation like Farbest and the growers who supply it. For Dubois County, that makes the stop more than a ceremonial appearance: it puts a major local employer and food processor in the same room as state officials who shape agriculture and rural-economy support.
Farbest has long tied its business to local farming. In a 2022 Indiana Workforce Board presentation, the company said it contributed hundreds of millions of dollars annually to farm families and row-crop farmers, including purchases of corn and soybeans used in turkey feed. The same presentation said Farbest supported workforce development through Vincennes University Jasper, Dubois County Career Cruise, Junior Achievement JobSpark and Dubois County Teacher’s Manufacturing Bootcamp.
The 2022 presentation also gave a closer look at the company’s Huntingburg plant, where Farbest said it employed about 716 workers, processed roughly 62,500 birds a day and had gone 3 million hours without a lost-time incident. That kind of production volume helps explain why state attention matters in Jasper and Huntingburg: any changes in labor supply, transportation costs, agricultural inputs or processing capacity would ripple beyond Farbest employees and into the growers, truckers and suppliers tied to the business.
Farbest says the Seger family has owned the company since 1998, extending a family-run structure that has helped anchor one of Dubois County’s biggest industrial employers. Beckwith’s visit put that local footprint in plain view, along with the state policy levers that could influence how much turkey the company can raise, process and ship in the years ahead.
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