Partners in Poultry

As the director of food safety and animal welfare at Cal-Maine Foods, Dr. Ryn Laster can attest to the vitality of the educational services and support the Mississippi State University Extension Service provides for poultry farmers across the state.  

She is a client herself.  

The four-time MSU graduate and three-time chairperson of the board of the Mississippi Poultry Association has been based at Cal-Maine’s corporate office in Ridgeland in Madison County for more than 25 years. During that time, she says, Cal-Maine has relied on MSU Extension to troubleshoot issues requiring outside observers or to receive help researching a poultry-related problem.  

In 2015, an outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI, across the U.S. prompted accelerated safety protocols across the Cal-Maine enterprise in 17 states. Laster contacted MSU Extension to conduct an in-person visit and help review safety protocols. 

“We had material like wooden pallets that needed to be moved from farm to farm after HPAI came through our breaking plant,” Laster says. “We wanted to heat-treat the pallets and see if it would decrease any bacterial load and any potential viral load so we could avoid disease issues with transferring materials from farm to farm.” 

Laster says MSU Extension poultry scientists and several others in the department accepted the challenge and built and tested a heat treatment chamber.  

“We swabbed and swabbed the plastic egg flats, but MSU Extension was right there with us helping us figure out a solution to the issue, and it worked,” she says. “I can’t stress enough how much Extension helped us during this time. Knowing that the heat treatment was successful was huge for us being able to still send eggs to our breaking plants. I call on the great folks at the Extension Service a lot to help me with questions. This is just one example.” 

Raised in a farming family, Laster finished a bachelor’s degree in English from MSU in 1991. She entered law school but realized law wasn’t her calling. She went on to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in poultry science and food science from MSU in the 1990s. 

“I wanted to do something positive for Mississippi and for agriculture, and I started looking at career paths. The MSU Department of Poultry Science had a 100% job placement rate for graduating seniors, and after meeting the people in that department, I knew it was where I wanted to be,” she emphasizes. “Those people became my second family, and they still are today.” 

Quality control and food safety have been key areas of Laster’s work in agriculture. Her first career move was to Nashville, where a business was looking for someone to conduct research on muscle foods, including poultry. 

“I moved there and started working with McDonalds and Wendy’s on the use of MSG in foods,” Laster remembers. “The chief scientific officer at this company was a pediatric neurologist at Vanderbilt, and he had lots of patients who had severe allergic reactions to the MSG levels in these foods. We were looking at a product he developed as replacement for it.” 

The next step found her back in the Magnolia State in Hattiesburg as the quality assurance manager at the Marshall Durbin poultry processing plant, where chicken for fast-food restaurants including KFC, Church’s, and Popeyes was produced. Three years later, she landed back in her hometown of Raymond where she is now at Cal-Maine. After settling in, she went back to MSU and earned her doctorate in poultry science in 2008. 

MSU Extension poultry specialist Jonathan Moon says Laster is one of many alumni of the university’s poultry science unit who are considered part of a family. 

“We have served Dr. Laster and Cal-Maine in various capacities over the years by assisting with research, recruiting students, or implementing industry workshops, but this relationship is certainly a two-way street,” Moon explains. “They are always there to utilize, support, and promote the poultry science department, and she is always there to promote and represent the poultry industry whether it be in state government, industry outreach, youth programs, or Mississippi Women for Agriculture.” 

In addition to Cal-Maine, Laster says, all the Mississippi Poultry Association’s member companies rely on MSU Extension, and she sees the organization as an asset to the state’s entire poultry industry. 

“I don’t have to recommend MSU Extension because it is already the go-to for our industry,” she emphasizes. “Extension is a lot like Cal-Maine in that you don’t meet a stranger, and everyone is helpful. Extension folks are just good people, and they want to help. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to grow the kind of crops that are grown here. There is so much research that goes into all aspects of agriculture that the public has no idea about, but they benefit from it in that they have food on their tables.” 

Laster’s completion of four degrees at MSU and collaborations with MSU Extension are among several connections she has to the university. Her father, Bob Laster, and both of her daughters, Carlee McDonald Soignier and Camryn McDonald are MSU graduates. Her son-in-law, Tyler Soignier, is the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station research and MSU Extension program manager based at the E.G. Morrison Brown Loam Branch Experiment Station in Hinds County.