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Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

IndustryNAICS 11239Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting

Other Poultry Production (U.S.) — NAICS 11239

An investor's primer for a general audience — relevant to both public-market and private investors. This is a rollup page for a NAICS industry (five-digit code) that contains a single child industry. Federal statistics are cited to U.S. government sources; company facts to trade, corporate, and news reporting. NAICS = North American Industry Classification System.

1. Overview

NAICS 11239, Other Poultry Production, is the federal catch-all for farming every domesticated bird that is not a meat chicken, an egg-laying chicken, or a turkey — in practice ducks and geese, game birds (pheasant, quail, partridge, guinea fowl), squab (young pigeon), and ratites (ostrich, emu, rhea) [1]. It is a small, mature, premium-and-specialty corner of American agriculture: a low-tens-of-millions-of-birds-a-year business anchored by duck, dominated by a handful of private, family-owned operators, and unusually exposed to two swing factors — grain (feed) prices and avian influenza.

This page is a rollup. Because 11239 has exactly one child industry, the numbers and the story are effectively identical to that child. Read this page for the level definition and its own headline stats; go to the child primer for the full detail.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

Under the 2022 NAICS structure, the five-digit industry 11239 breaks down into a single six-digit national industry:

  • 112390 — Other Poultry Production

There is no second child to aggregate, so 11239 and 112390 describe the same set of establishments. The five-digit "rollup" adds no companies, no extra segment, and no different scope — it is a pass-through. (This is common at the bottom of the NAICS tree: many industries have just one national detail code, and the U.S. does not subdivide it further.)

Full company detail, supply-chain layers, regulation, and risks live in the child primer: [NAICS 112390 — Other Poultry Production]. The sections below give this level's own ground-truth figures and a compact synthesis so the page stands on its own.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures)

Ground-truth note. Our ingested federal statistics for the 11239 node itself contain no metrics — no establishment count, employment, or receipts total. That is expected and structural, not an error, for two reasons:

  1. Single-child pass-through. Because 11239 equals 112390, this level carries no separate figures of its own; the measurable statistics attach to the six-digit child.
  2. Farms are not counted like firms. Crop and animal production (NAICS sector 11) is largely excluded from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns, Business Dynamics Statistics, and Nonemployer Statistics [20]. Farms are instead measured by USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) programs that count birds and farms, not "firms" and "payroll." A standard business-statistics undercount is therefore built in, and it is compounded here by heavy small-farm and individual ownership (game-bird, hobbyist, and artisanal operations) that formal firm counts miss.

The one industry-specific business figure carried at the child level is the SBA (Small Business Administration) size standard of $3.75 million in average annual receipts — the ceiling below which a firm counts as "small" for federal programs [2]. We do not substitute any suppressed value.

What USDA does measure (the real yardsticks for this level):

  • Ducks (the anchor segment): about 24.8 million ducks slaughtered under federal inspection in 2024, down from 28.2 million in 2023 (roughly 177 million pounds live weight) — a decline tracking bird-flu pressure [3].
  • Farm inventories (2022 Census of Agriculture, birds on hand Dec. 31): ducks 4.4 million, pheasants 3.3 million, quail 9.3 million [4].
  • Ratites (ostrich/emu/rhea) are tiny and shrinking: the 2022 Census counted 232 farms raising 3,523 ostriches, down from 714 farms and 11,188 ostriches in 2007 [6].

Bottom line: measured by birds, this is a low-tens-of-millions-of-head industry led by duck; measured by dollars, it is a rounding error next to broiler chickens and eggs. Treat any single market-size dollar figure for the whole code with caution [5][6].

4. Investable universe (where the value concentrates)

Because 11239 is a single-child code, value concentrates exactly where it does in 112390: in private hands, and overwhelmingly in duck. There is no U.S.-listed pure-play operator.

  • Duck is consolidated. Two northern-Indiana firms — Maple Leaf Farms (~10 million ducks/year, largest in North America, fully vertically integrated) and Culver Duck Farms (~6 million/year) — account for roughly three-quarters of U.S. duck output [7][8][9]. Other notable private duck operators include Joe Jurgielewicz & Son (PA), Reichardt (CA), Crescent Duck Farm (NY), and foie-gras specialists Hudson Valley Foie Gras / La Belle Farm [10][11].
  • Game birds and ratites are fragmented. Leaders such as MacFarlane Pheasants (WI) and Manchester Farms quail (SC) sit atop a long tail of tiny farms serving hunting preserves and fine dining [12][13].
  • Public exposure is indirect only. The nearest listed proxies sit in other NAICS codes and move on shared feed-cost and avian-influenza dynamics — feed/grain (ADM, Bunge), animal health (Zoetis, Elanco), diversified poultry/food (Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, Cal-Maine, Vital Farms), and rendering (Darling Ingredients). None is a duck or game-bird business.

Full company table, scale, and the "Maple Leaf Farms is not Maple Leaf Foods" naming trap are in the child primer.

5. How the money works

Operators run a differentiated commodity-protein business: revenue = birds sold × dressed weight × price per pound, plus valued byproducts (down and feathers, eggs, ducklings, and — at the top end — foie gras) [1][8]. Duck sells at a premium to chicken because it is largely a restaurant and export product, and the carcass is monetized in pieces (breast, legs/confit, whole roasters).

The dominant cost is feed (corn and soybean meal), so the feed-conversion ratio and grain prices set the margin. Vertical integration is the model — breeder flock → hatchery → feed mill → grow-out (company-owned or contract growers) → processing → distribution — which captures margin, protects proprietary genetics, and lets one operator enforce biosecurity end to end [8][10]. Profit comes from genetics and brand, favorable product mix, and export access to Asia and Mexico, where per-capita duck demand dwarfs the U.S. Game-bird economics differ (live birds to hunting preserves and dressed birds to restaurants); ratite economics rest on a thin gourmet-meat-plus-oil-plus-leather stack that has never scaled [6][12][13].

6. Demand drivers

  • Foodservice and restaurants, especially Asian cuisine (Peking/roast duck), fine dining, and hotels — duck is disproportionately eaten out, not at home [5][8].
  • Ethnic, immigrant, and holiday demand across Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Central-European cooking.
  • Exports to Asia and Mexico — a material share of the majors' sales [8][10].
  • Hunting-preserve activity for pheasant and quail (released-bird shooting, dog training) [12][13].
  • Niche/gourmet angles — ostrich/emu as lean red-meat substitutes, emu oil, duck and quail eggs, foie gras where legal, and byproducts.
  • General discretionary spending — because duck is discretionary, demand is more income- and travel-sensitive than staple chicken.

This is a premium-and-specialty demand story, not a mass-volume one.

7. Regulation

The regulatory picture is identical to the child's. Key touchpoints:

  • Disease control. USDA's APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) runs the NPIP (National Poultry Improvement Plan) certification program [17]. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) is the central risk — APHIS mandates rapid response, biosecurity, and depopulation of infected flocks, with indemnity and cost-share payments that need not cover lost customers or future cash flow [16]. The U.S. has not authorized routine HPAI vaccination of poultry [11][16].
  • Mandatory inspection. Ducks, geese, guinea fowl, squab, and ratites are subject to carcass-by-carcass inspection by USDA's FSIS (Food Safety and Inspection Service) under the PPIA (Poultry Products Inspection Act) [14][18].
  • Animal welfare. Foie gras (force-feeding) is the flashpoint — California bans in-state sale and New York City has pursued its own ban, both litigated [15].
  • Environmental. Larger confined operations can be regulated as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) under Clean Water Act NPDES rules [19].

8. Consolidation

The industry is already consolidated and still concentrating — in duck, two Indiana firms control roughly 75% of output [7]. The moats are real for a niche: breeding genetics, expensive specialized processing plants, biosecurity discipline, and decades-old foodservice/export relationships. The long arc is illustrated by Long Island, once the heart of American duck, which went from roughly 90 farms to a single survivor (Crescent Duck Farm) — which then lost its entire flock to bird flu in January 2025 [11]. By contrast, game-bird and ratite segments stay fragmented; the 1990s ratite boom collapsed and has shrunk by about two-thirds since 2007 [6]. Further consolidation is more likely through private succession and strategic acquisitions than public roll-ups.

9. Risks

  • Avian influenza (HPAI) — the defining, existential risk. For a single-site farm, an outbreak means total flock destruction and months of downtime, with no routine vaccination allowed as a backstop; the 2022-onward outbreak has affected more than 166 million U.S. birds across species [11][16].
  • Feed-cost volatility hits thin margins directly.
  • Concentration, key-person, and customer-concentration risk — few operators, family ownership, and small producers reliant on a handful of buyers.
  • Regulatory and animal-welfare pressure (foie-gras bans) [15].
  • Export dependence — a disease-driven ban or tariff shift bites margin.
  • Niche-demand fragility, capital intensity, and information opacity — discretionary demand falls in downturns, infrastructure needs ongoing investment, and private firms disclose little.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes are indirect only. There is no listed pure-play. The honest options are upstream suppliers (feed/grain — ADM, Bunge; animal health — Zoetis, Elanco), poultry-macro proxies (Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, Cal-Maine, Vital Farms) that share the same feed-cost and bird-flu dynamics while being chicken/egg/turkey businesses in other NAICS codes, and downstream byproduct (Darling Ingredients).

Private routes are where the industry actually is: direct ownership or acquisition of a family duck/game-bird operation (succession transitions are the most realistic entry), contract growing for an integrator, private credit secured by land/barns/processing/inventory, farmland-and-infrastructure leasing, niche branded products, and agritourism/hunting-preserve businesses. Underwrite for flock health and disease history, marketable-bird economics, customer contracts, processing and permitting access, insurance, debt service, and management succession.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). A structurally small, slow-growth, mature industry — do not underwrite it for volume growth, and no reliable industry-wide revenue base or growth forecast exists in the federal statistics. The near-term overhang is HPAI plus feed costs (duck slaughter fell 28.2M → 24.8M head, 2023→2024) [3]; the durable tailwinds are ethnic/foodservice demand, exports, and premiumization — a case for value, not volume. The single biggest swing factor is disease policy: routine HPAI vaccination, if permitted, would materially de-risk the whole sector. Expect continued consolidation, and expect meaningful returns to accrue to private owners and operators, because for this industry the stock market is not where the assets are.

For the full company roster, supply-chain map, and detailed sourcing, see the child primer: [NAICS 112390 — Other Poultry Production].

Sources

Drawn from the child primer (NAICS 112390), to which readers are referred for full detail.

  1. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 NAICS: 112390 Other Poultry Production (definition, examples, cross-references). https://www.census.gov/naics/?chart=2022&details=112390&input=112390
  2. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 112390 = $3.75M average annual receipts), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards (Histometrics ingested ground-truth statistic, carried at the child level.)
  3. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. Poultry Slaughter — 2024 Summary, February 2025. https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/pg15bd88s/k356c167m/z029r057b/pslaan25.pdf
  4. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. 2022 Census of Agriculture — Poultry and Egg Production (Highlights), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Poultry.pdf
  5. Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (Iowa State University). Ducks and Geese. Accessed 2026. https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/livestock-dairy-poultry/poultry/ducks-and-geese
  6. Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (Iowa State University). Ostrich and Emu. Accessed 2026. https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/livestock-dairy-poultry/ostrich-and-emu-53585
  7. Indiana Economic Digest / WANE 15. Two Indiana farms lead North America in duck production, 2024. https://www.wane.com/top-stories/2-companies-in-kosciusko-elkhart-counties-behind-majority-of-us-duck-production/
  8. Hoosier Ag Today. How Maple Leaf Farms Contributes to Indiana's Number One Ranking for Duck Production, 2024. https://www.hoosieragtoday.com/2024/02/07/maple-leaf-farms/
  9. Iowa PBS, Market to Market. Indiana Company Tackles Challenges in Duck Production, 2023. https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/mtom/market-feature/clip/8905/indiana-company-tackles-challenges-in-duck-production
  10. Philadelphia Magazine (Foobooz). Meet Pennsylvania's Duck Dynasty (Joe Jurgielewicz & Son), 2025. https://www.phillymag.com/foobooz/2025/03/03/joe-jurgielewicz-and-son-pennsylvania-duck-dynasty/
  11. RiverheadLOCAL. 'Bird flu' outbreak shutters Long Island's last duck farm (Crescent Duck Farm), January 2025. https://riverheadlocal.com/2025/01/22/bird-flu-outbreak-shutters-long-islands-last-duck-farm-as-culling-of-90000-birds-is-underway/
  12. MacFarlane Pheasants Inc. Pheasant History — America's largest pheasant farm. Accessed 2026. https://www.pheasant.com/about-us/history
  13. SC Biz News. Manchester Farms grows into largest US quail producer, 2017. https://scbiz.com/manchester-farms-grows-into-largest-us-quail-producer/
  14. Federal Register / USDA FSIS. Mandatory Inspection of Ratites and Squabs, 2002. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2002/03/22/02-6836/mandatory-inspection-of-ratites-and-squabs
  15. CBS News. As bird flu ravages poultry industry, the damage spreads, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-bird-flu-ravages-poultry-industry-the-damage-spreads/
  16. USDA APHIS. HPAI in Poultry (response, depopulation, indemnity; >166M birds affected). Accessed 2026. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-poultry
  17. USDA APHIS. National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP). Accessed 2026. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/nvap/reference-guide/poultry/npip
  18. USDA FSIS. Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA), 2023. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/policy/food-safety-acts/poultry-products-inspection-act
  19. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. 40 CFR 122.23 — Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (NPDES), 2026. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-122/section-122.23
  20. U.S. Census Bureau. Business Dynamics Statistics: About This Program and Nonemployer Statistics (both exclude crop and animal production, NAICS 11), 2025–2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/bds/about.html; https://www.census.gov/econ/overview/mu0500.html