However, some “irritants” are present for each country in the runup to NAFTA renegotiations, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said at a joint news conference at the Port of Savannah, Georgia. He declined to elaborate.

“Now is not the time to talk about them. These are family discussions that need to take place,” Perdue said. He compared the 23-year-old trade relationship to a marriage.

Renegotiation of NAFTA was a key campaign promise of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has pledged to shrink goods trade deficits that stood at US$63 billion with Mexico and US$11 billion with Canada last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

While the U.S. has criticized NAFTA’s impact on domestic manufacturing, it has recognized the agreement’s benefits to agriculture.

“We’ve come together to acknowledge that by and large NAFTA has been a favourable agreement for our three (agriculture) sectors in all three countries from an agricultural perspective,” Perdue said. “That is the communication I gave to President Trump.”

Perdue is meeting with Canada’s minister of agriculture, Lawrence MacAulay, and Mexico’s secretary of agriculture, Jose Calzada, in his home state for several days this week to lay groundwork for upcoming NAFTA renegotiation talks.

— Reporting for Reuters by Harriet McLeod in Garden City, Georgia, and Karl Plume in Chicago.

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Birds have been found dead of unnatural causes in 16 chicken houses at six farms that grow chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the largest poultry producer in the U.S., which laid off some 60 people right before the killings began, Clarendon County Sheriff Randy Garrett said.

The company has a processing plant at Sumter, S.C., about 150 km north of Charleston.

About 325,000 chickens have been found dead at the farms since mid-February, Garrett said. One farmer, W.L. Coker, lost the birds in eight chicken houses, or about 160,000 birds, he said.

Authorities are searching for killers with a deep working knowledge of raising chickens, Garrett said, adding that he believed the deaths of the chickens are related to the layoffs.

Vandals bypassed alarm systems and raised or lowered temperature in the chicken houses, killing them, Garrett said.

“Depending on the age of the birds, they knew whether to jack the heat up or jack the heat off,” Garrett said.

Young birds need more heat, and older ones need less, he said.

“They had all that knowledge of the farms and how many weeks growth the chickens were,” Garrett said.

Garrett said his office has contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state police.

Pilgrim’s Pride said in a statement that it was fully co-operating with authorities.

“These unfortunate, yet apparently deliberate acts show a blatant disregard for the welfare of the chickens and the livelihood of the family farmers involved,” the statement said.

The acts were also condemned by state officials overseeing South Carolina’s agriculture industry.

“Farming presents its own unique challenges without something like this happening,” South Carolina agriculture commissioner Hugh Weathers said in a statement.

— Harriet McLeod is a Reuters reporter based in Charleston, S.C.

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