Family farmers grow chickens.
There are more than 1,300 family-owned farms on Delmarva, where families live and farm by raising broiler chickens. Just as it has been for generations, chicken farming is a way for Delmarva families to make a living from the land - and provide food for all of us.
Chickens grow our economy.
Delmarva's chicken companies alone employ more than 18,000 people, in fields from engineering to poultry processing to finance to veterinary medicine. By partnering with independent family farms and hundreds of allied businesses, the chicken industry on Delmarva delivers $13.6 billion in economic impact and supports more than 50,000 total jobs.
We all safeguard the environment.
Farmers and everyone involved in putting chicken on your table care deeply about protecting the environment and raising chicken sustainably. It takes 75% fewer resources to produce chicken today than it did in the 1960s, and more than 95% of poultry litter is recycled and reused as organic fertilizer for crops. Together, we've reduced our impact on the Chesapeake Bay and Delmarva's air and water.
Learn more about DCA's celebration of the 100th anniversary of America's broiler chicken industry. Click here.
Delmarva Chicken Association is the 1,600-member trade association working for the common good of the meat chicken industry in Delaware, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and Virginia's Eastern Shore.
Our mission: To be the Delmarva chicken industry's voice as the premier membership association focusing on advocacy, education and member relations.
Our vision: To be the most-respected chicken organization in the United States.
FEATURED NEWS
2023 Delmarva Chicken Festival Will Celebrate 100 Years of Growing Chicken
- James Fisher
- March 13, 2023
- DCA
The Delmarva Chicken Festival, a long-running and beloved public event from 1948 to 2014, will return in 2023 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first dedicated broiler chicken farm on Delmarva. The festival will take place October 7, 2023 from 1-7 p.m. at Arthur... Read More
Delmarva's 'Chicken GDP' Hits $5 Billion Mark
- James Fisher
- February 28, 2023
- DCA
The Delmarva chicken community raised 596 million chickens, produced 4.4 billion pounds of shelf- and table-ready chicken and generated a record $5 billion in wholesale value in 2022. These insights into the chicken industry's important role in Delmarva's economy come... Read More
FEATURED VIDEOS
Buffer Bites: VEB Demo Days
- DCA hosted chicken growers on farms in Maryland and Delaware, partnering with Nanticoke Watershed Alliance to showcase farms that have planted and nurtured vegetative environmental buffers in novel places to improve air quality, efficiency and appearance. Lisa Wool talks about how these practices help farmers and their neighbors. - Posted: June, 16, 2021
Buffer Bites: Don't weed-whack your buffers!
- Vegetative environmental buffers can be harmed by too-zealous weed trimming. Here, DCA's Jim Passwaters walks you through weed-control options on a chicken farm with buffers. - Posted: February, 19, 2020
Buffer Bites: Edible berries
- You might be surprised to learn some families raising chickens on Delmarva are planting edible berries, like black chokeberries and blackberry bushes, on their farms as living buffers - making the farms less obvious to neighbors, muffling sound, filtering dust and odor, and improving water quality. Our vegetative environmental buffers expert, Jim Passwaters, talks about two berry plants that work well on chicken farms in this edition of 'Buffer Bites.' - Posted: February, 19, 2020