By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Every year, six billion newborn chicks are killed at egg-laying facilities around the world. Usually, they’re either gassed or shredded to death en masse. These aren’t accidental killings, but rather, an established practice in the egg industry known as “chick culling.” Despite a nonbinding pledge to end the practice by 2020, U.S. egg producers still cull, or kill, 300 million chicks a year as a standard operating procedure.
So, why is chick culling still a thing, and when — if ever — will it end?
What Is Chick Culling, and Why Does It Happen?
When a chicken egg hatches, there’s a roughly 50 percent chance that the chick inside will be male. In the meat industry, this is no problem, because male and female chickens can both be raised as “broilers,” or chickens slaughtered for meat. But in the egg industry, male chicks are a problem.
Up until the early 20th century, U.S. farmers used “dual purpose” chicken breeds for both egg-laying and meat. This changed around the 1920s, when farmers began selectively breeding chickens for one purpose or another. Now, 100 years later, the hens at egg-laying facilities have been bred to pump out as many eggs as possible in their lifetimes, while the chickens at meat facilities have been bred to grow fat as quickly as possible.
Thanks to selective breeding, male chicks that are born at egg-laying facilities will not grow to be especially fat, and the quality of their meat will be poor. But as living creatures, they still require food, water and resources to survive, and all of those things cost farmers money — more money than they’d get from selling the chickens for meat.
The financial calculus, though macabre, is clear: it’s cheaper to kill male chicks after birth than to raise them as broilers. And that’s exactly what farmers at egg-laying facilities do.
In the U.S. and Canada, the most common method of chick-culling is maceration — that is, grinding the chicks to death en masse. Chicks are also culled via gassing, suffocation and electrocution.
What Alternatives Are There To Chick Culling?
In 2016, the industry trade group United Egg Producers (UEP) issued a non-binding pledge to phase out chick culling by 2020. That obviously hasn’t happened, but the group says it remains committed to doing so in the future. If and when the industry does finally move away from chick culling, what might that look like?
In-ovo Sexing
Right now, the most popular and viable alternative to chick culling is something called in-ovo sexing. This is the practice of determining the sex of a chicken embryo before the egg hatches, so that eggs with male chicken embryos can be used as animal feed before they’re hatched.
While this technology is still in its infancy, it’s become increasingly popular among European egg producers, in part because several European countries have banned chick culling. Although it has yet to be introduced to the U.S. egg market, at least two companies have committed to using in ovo sexing, one by October of this year.
There are a lot of different in-ovo sexing technologies — around 11 of them, according to a recent review of scientific literature and patents. Some involve drilling a small hole in a newly-laid egg, extracting and testing a fluid sample, and then sealing the hole with beeswax or another substance; other in-ovo sexing technologies are non-invasive, and only require the egg to be optically scanned to determine the sex of the embryo.
Genetic Engineering
Another potential solution to chick culling is gene editing. In recent years, there have been several efforts to create a genetically modified breed of chicken that only lays eggs with female embryos, which would theoretically solve the problem of chick culling entirely. The Israeli company Huminn claims to have accomplished something very close to this.
Huminn’s “Golda hens,” as it refers to them, lay eggs that react differently to blue light depending on the gender of the embryo. If it’s a female, the egg develops normally, but if it’s a male embryo, the blue light halts its development entirely. As such, no male chicks are born, or culled, from Golda hens.
Farming Just One Breed of Chicken
Lastly, there’s a decidedly old-school solution to the problem of chick culling, which is to stop using different breeds of chicken for meat and egg-laying.
For most of agricultural history, this was the norm. Male chickens were eaten, and female chickens were kept around to lay eggs (and then eaten). But over the course of the 20th century, producers selectively bred chickens at an aggressive rate in order to maximize both egg and meat production. As a result, some chicken breeds now lay an unnatural amount of eggs, while others grow to be unnaturally large; the former are used as layers, while the latter are used for meat.
While this specialized breeding is more efficient and profitable for egg producers, it’s also the reason chick culling exists. If farms reverted back to the historical standard, and used dual-purpose chickens like the Rhode Island Red for both eggs and meat, chick culling would be a thing of the past.
Why Aren’t Egg Producers Using These Technologies Already?
Some are. Sort of. In Europe, many egg producers have embraced in-ovo sexing. The largest hatchery in Europe began using in-ovo technology in 2021, and a September 2023 analysis found that 15 percent of egg-laying hens in the European Union were sexed in-ovo. The technology has been implemented in several more European countries since then.
In the U.S, however, in-ovo sexing technology isn’t yet being used. Why?
No Legal Prohibitions Against Chick Culling in the U.S.
As of this writing, chick culling is banned in Austria, France, Germany and Luxembourg. Italy has banned the practice as well, though it doesn’t take effect until the end of 2026, and Switzerland has banned the grinding, but not the gassing, of male chicks.
In the U.S., by contrast, chick culling is fully legal. While there are technological and financial challenges to adopting in-ovo sexing, the lack of any legal pressure to do so is undoubtedly a huge reason for its lack of progress as well.
Problems Scaling
In 2021, United Egg Producers said in a press release that, while it’s still committed to phasing out chick culling, the technology used in Europe isn’t ready to be launched in the U.S., as it doesn’t satisfy: “food safety, ethical standards and a scalable solution.”
Respeggt is one of the companies that has developed in-ovo sexing technology, and its system has been in use at the largest hatchery in Norway for the last year. Over the course of that year, the company’s technology sexed about 20 million eggs in Norway and German. That’s a relatively small fraction of the approximately 600 million eggs that need to be sexed every year in the United States in order to keep up with current rates of egg consumption.
Other Issues With In-Ovo Technology
In addition to scaling issues, in-ovo technology also faces a question of timing. The goal of ending male chick culling — at least, from an animal welfare perspective — is to prevent the pain and suffering chicks feel when they’re killed. In order to do this, however, egg producers need to be able to identify the sex of an embryo before that embryo is capable of feeling pain.
This is where things get tricky, because there’s no consensus yet on the question of when exactly a chicken embryo can feel pain. Some studies put the number at seven days after hatching, while others suggest that it’s closer to 13 days.
That discrepancy matters a lot. If the 13-day estimate is correct, Respeggt’s in-ovo tech is potentially a great way to reduce pain, as it can detect the sex of a chick between eight and 11 days after it’s hatched. But if the seven-day estimate is the accurate one, Respeggt’s technology won’t be able to save any chicken embryos from feeling pain.
That said, since many male chicks are ground up alive, it’s probably still a less painful death than they’d experience if they were born and culled.
Efficiency and Profits
As mentioned earlier, switching to dual-purpose chicken breeds would eliminate the perceived necessity of chick culling. But it would also result in fewer eggs and less chicken meat being produced, as dual-purpose breeds are less efficient than specialized ones. Supply would go down, but without any corresponding drop in demand, poultry prices would increase significantly.
At its current state, in-ovo sexing would also result in pricier eggs, though probably only by a couple of pennies.
Will the U.S. Ever Stop Culling Male Chicks?
Despite the slow progress, there’s still hope that U.S. egg producers will eventually follow Europe’s lead and phase out chick culling.
John Brunnquell is the founder and president of Egg Innovations, a company that sells free-range and pasture-raised chicken eggs. In March, Brunnquell told the New York Times that the main hatchery he uses is set to start using in-ovo sexing technology in early 2025, and will hopefully be selling cull-free eggs later that summer.
It’s unclear which form of in-ovo sexing technology that hatchery will be using, and Brunnquell declined to identify the hatchery, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
In May of this year, the Dutch egg producer Kipster announced a commitment to use in-ovo sexing in its Indiana egg operation by October.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, the reason most of the egg industry still cull chicks is because it’s legal and more profitable than the alternatives. Animal rights activists have called for a ban on chick culling in the U.S. to no avail. Some animal protection groups, including The Humane League, have been working to persuade brands like Kipster to adopt alternative methods.
The key to getting the rest of the U.S. egg industry on board is to ensure methods like in-ovo sexing are just as profitable as the alternative. Thankfully, there are signs that this is happening. The price of sexing chicks in-ovo has dropped steadily over the last five years, and if cull-free eggs are able to achieve price parity with the competition, male chicks may soon be spared the fate that so many of them face every day.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating a bird flu outbreak at an Arkansas broiler operation in Clay County as well as in some backyard flocks across the state.
According to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, close to 230,000 birds have been exposed to the HPAI virus.
Jada Thompson, associate professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness at the University of Arkansas, said conditions in poultry facilities contribute to the spread of the illness.
"The breeding systems prolong the cost of the disease outbreak and prolongs the replenishment of that system," Thompson explained. "When we start talking about the disease outbreak, it's not even just the direct impact and the biological lag to replenishment, but it's also the multiplicative impact in terms of further upstream on that system."
Since December, birds have tested positive in seven counties across Arkansas including Sharp, Craighead and Lafayette.
As bird flu cases increase across the country, consumers are seeing higher prices at grocery stores. Thompson said the outbreaks also create financial strains for the agriculture industry, forcing companies to adjust their business practices in some cases.
"These practices have to go into place and those are additional costs," Thompson pointed out. "There's additional costs for the monitoring and surveillance, for the cleaning and disinfections. There's additional costs for the testing, and that's going to be to the producer, to the integrator, to the government officials to the testing labs."
The outbreak is being monitored by the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, Game and Fish Commission and the Arkansas Department of Public Health.
get more stories like this via email
By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Imagery is a powerful cornerstone of food marketing — think of a laughing cow on cheese — often playing an outsize role in what consumers ultimately choose to buy. But when it comes to the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs, the branding does not necessarily match reality. Appealing to the emotional part of the brain, visuals are there to tell a story to connect with consumers, not provide transparency about the meat or milk in your cart.
As author, academic and activist Carol J. Adams tells Sentient, “We’re in an image-based world,” and “images accomplish a lot, going around rational minds, right to the emotion.” After all, in the minds of many consumers, how farm animals are raised is important.
Symbols like red barns, rolling green pastures, sunshine and happy animals are common on meat and dairy labels. But how accurate are the most common visual representations? Sentient spoke to Adams, author of the books “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” “The Pornography of Meat,” and others, as well as to Jo-Anne McArthur, photojournalist and founder of We Animals, to compare common tropes in advertising with the reality of industrial animal agriculture today.
Misleading Advertising Expectation #1: The Traditional Barn
The red or otherwise traditional barn is a prominent symbol used in meat, dairy and egg marketing. Rooted in childhood nursery rhymes, fables and films, the barn helps paint farming as wholesome and idyllic. From “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to “Charlotte’s Web” and “Babe,” we learn at an early age that farms are peaceful places where animals roam freely.
As adults, we find that same barn imagery on labels for meat, dairy and eggs. Adams argues these images are placed to evoke feelings of comfort, familiarity and trust; a powerful marketing tool. “You’d really have to stretch the notion of barn to apply it to these [modern] institutions,” she argues.
McArthur has been to over 60 countries to document agricultural spaces, and says that what she often finds is “that the barns are actually very big warehouses. Gone are the days of the small red barn.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are approximately 74.5 million hogs and pigs at any given time raised on around 56,265 U.S. farms. This means the average building holds over 1,300 animals per farm; not quite a little red barn. The majority of farm animals in the U.S. are housed in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs), which operate “more like factories than farms.”
Misleading Advertising Expectation #2: Green Pastures for All
Another visual commonly utilized in the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs is that of green fields and grassy hills. Sometimes accompanied by bright sunshine, blue skies and blue water, these symbols elicit notions of farming as a natural endeavor.
Agriculture, however depicted, is an entirely human invention developed to feed ourselves more efficiently, not a product of nature. Today, the vast majority of farm animals are raised on factory farms; not on rolling pastures. Space is particularly tight for chickens.
“For the most part, birds who are used to lay eggs don’t ever have access to daylight,” says McArthur. They are kept in windowless warehouses, often with artificial lighting used to manipulate laying cycles. Around 60 percent of hens in the U.S. egg industry are confined to battery cages, the smallest size cages allowed by law. In Canada that number is over 80 percent.
For poultry chickens, also known as broilers, no outdoor access is ever required by USDA standards, unless the label claims “organic” or “free-range,” then outdoor access is mandated by USDA guidelines. On industrial farms — which can house up to 50,000 birds — each chicken is provided as little as 100 square inches each, as per the National Chicken Council’s minimal guidelines.
There are some programs that do require chickens to have “access” to the outdoors, such as Certified Animal Welfare Approved and USDA Organic, but what that means in practice varies. Certified Humane standards, for example, do not require that chickens have access to the outdoors at all, unless specified as “free range” or “pasture raised.”
This limited access to green fields and sunshine is simply not the norm for the majority of egg-laying hens, nor broiler chickens farmed in the U.S.
And as we’ll see with our next piece of misleading advertising, pasture is only the norm for beef cows, and for around four to six months, give or take depending on the farm.
Misleading Advertising Expectation #3: Green, Not Brown
On a label, green tends to connote healthy and natural to consumers. “Green is a positive color, and green fields imply bucolic,” Adams says. Unfortunately, though, the use of the green pastures on meat labels is often not accurate. In fact, the reality is much…browner.
“Where is all the manure?” Adams asks. “Where is the dirty water that comes from these huge manure fields?” In reality, modern farming operations produce immense amounts of waste, around 1.4 billion tons of manure each year. That waste is supposed to be spread onto fields to help crops grow — but the sheer volume of waste coupled with spills from accidents or extreme weather leads to plenty of exceptions.
Manure from agricultural operations is the primary source of phosphorus and nitrogen contamination in surface and groundwater, leading to undrinkable water supply in factory farm frontline communities in states like Iowa and North Carolina.
Beef cattle in the U.S. spend at least some of the first part of their lives on pasture. Over half of them eventually end up in dusty feedlots for fattening, before being sent to slaughter. As of January 2024 in the U.S., there were 14.4 million cows and calves on feedlots.
McArthur has been to industrial feedlots all over the world, including in the U.S. and Canada, and describes them as cramped and dirty spaces, where animals are “not given much room to move, explore or do anything natural.” They are also often slippery, she says, due to the excessive amount of animal waste. “It’s not a place that animals can romp around on.”
Misleading Advertising Expectation #4: Happy Cows and Other Cartoon Animals
Meat, dairy and egg companies that include animals in their branding often use cartoon depictions or simple silhouettes, rather than real images of animals.
This may sound harmless enough, but Adams, who has been called a pioneer of vegan-feminist critical theory, argues there is a more sinister intent behind the tactic. Meat marketers tend to shy away from real images, she says, as “that would perpetuate the lie that animals want to be our food. So they have to rely on different cultural tropes, and the cartoon is one of them. The cartoon sort of liberates them into a bigger lie.”
From her work photographing farmed animals, McArthur adds, “you would be really hard-pressed to find an animal that could be photographed to look pretty [enough for marketing purposes],” she says, “because they are very, very dirty, because they don’t have the ability to clean themselves in these conditions.” She adds that it wouldn’t be possible to “go into a place like this and take a beautiful picture that would make us want to eat these animals.”
The use of cartoons like the “laughing cow” helps perpetuate the image of happy and clean animals, animals who only experience what is often described as “one bad day” by farmers who tout their welfare standards. Again, the vast majority of animals are not raised on such farms.
“There’s a desire [by marketers] to sanitize, to sentimentalize, because the truth is threatening,” says Adams. “Avoiding some language and using a happy cow is a successful way of keeping complacent consumers.”
The Bottom Line
Meat, dairy and egg marketing relies heavily on imagery to shape consumer perceptions, with symbols like red barns and green pastures suggesting idyllic farming conditions. However, the reality is starkly different, with most farm animals confined to industrial, overcrowded environments, far from the serene settings depicted on labels. These carefully crafted visuals mask the grim conditions of factory farms, perpetuating a misleading narrative that sanitizes the true nature of industrial animal agriculture.
Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
As avian flu rapidly circulates in the U.S., Cal-Maine Foods, the nation’s largest egg producer, appears to be having a bumper year, bolstered in part by taxpayer bailouts in the multi-millions.
The company’s stocks recently soared to a record high, as its net sales rose by a staggering 82 percent last quarter. Cal-Maine Foods expanded its operations last spring, paying around $110 million in cash to acquire the assets and facilities of another egg producer, ISE America. Despite culling at least 1.6 million hens on infected farms last year, the poultry corporation is getting richer and bigger
U.S. taxpayers have given the poultry giant a lift. The company has received $44 million in indemnity payouts to compensate for bird deaths tied to the avian flu outbreak. Despite the company’s growth, Cal-Maine Foods is the fourth largest recipient of indemnity payments for the ongoing outbreak from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)’s indemnity program.
The compensation system, distinct from the agency’s program for livestock, pays poultry farmers and producers for the market value of the birds and eggs. It does not pay for birds that directly die from avian flu. It only pays for “infected or exposed poultry and/or eggs that are destroyed to control the disease,” — i.e. deliberately killed to prevent the spread of the virus. The agency also provides compensation for other virus control activities, such as destroying contaminated supplies and disinfecting a barn after an outbreak.
Nearly three years since the first H5N1 outbreak in U.S. poultry, the USDA has concluded that the agency’s compensation system has not worked as it intended. By bailing out poultry producers with few stipulations, the system has, inadvertently, lowered the economic risk of biosecurity lapses on farms, encouraging the virus’s spread. In other words, farmers have not been effectively incentivized to make changes to protect their flocks.
As the outbreak has continued to spread, the government bailout of the poultry industry has ballooned too. As of January 22nd, 2025, APHIS has doled out $1.46 billion in indemnity payments and additional compensation over the outbreak’s course, according to a figure provided to Sentient by a USDA spokesperson. This includes $1.138 billion for the loss of culled eggs and birds and $326 million for measures to prevent the virus’s spread.
A significant share — $301 million — of the indemnity payments have gone to just the top four producers, according to government spending data.
Jennie-O Turkey Store, based in Minnesota, tops the list for indemnity payouts: the popular turkey brand has received $120 million since the beginning of the H5N1 outbreak in 2022, according to government spending data. Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch, which supplies McDonald’s cage-free eggs, has received the second largest bailout at $89 million. Center Fresh Egg Farm, part of a group of farms owned by Versova, one of the largest U.S. egg producers, has received $46 million. (This data reflects the legally obligated amount of indemnity owed to each company, which means that the USDA may not have dispensed these payments in full yet.)
By comparison, when the first outbreak of avian flu swept the U.S. between 2014 and 2015, farmers and producers received just over $200 million in indemnity payments.
“The current regulations do not provide a sufficient incentive for producers in control areas or buffer zones to maintain biosecurity throughout an outbreak,” APHIS stated in December, which introduced new emergency guidelines in an attempt to remedy this incentive problem.
One of the preferred methods farms use to cull birds is by sealing off the air flow to the barn and then pumping in heat or carbon dioxide. Known as Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD+), this is a cheap way to kill an entire flock by heat stroke or suffocation, and is approved by the USDA for indemnity payments only under “constrained circumstances.” The top 10 recipients of indemnity payments all used VSD+ to often exterminate millions of birds at once, according to APHIS records obtained by Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and the executive director of Our Honor, through a FOIA request.
By compensating farmers for VSD+, this system has helped make what many animal welfare advocates consider an unnecessarily cruel death part of the industry standard.
The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) recently released a draft of new guidelines for depopulation, which notes when the heat fails, VSD+ can result in an “unacceptable numbers of survivors” — birds that are severely injured, but not yet dead, and then need to be killed by another means. Yet the AVMA’s draft guidelines, closely relied upon by the USDA, still include this method as an option.
Some animal protection advocates contend that poultry companies should not receive indemnity payments at all, regardless of biosecurity, arguing that the industry should be responsible for its own losses.
“Why should this high-risk business be bailed out?” Heath, a longtime critic of AVMA’s guidelines, tells Sentient. As an animal protection advocate, Heath has also been closely tracking indemnity payments throughout this outbreak. “What we’re seeing is the largest corporations are receiving the most in indemnity payments, and they’re using the most brutal methods of depopulation,” referring to the culling methods.
The bailout is set to only expand as H5N1 spreads, prompting the mass culling of more domestic flocks, in what has become the largest foreign animal disease outbreak in U.S. history. The egg industry continues to be roiled: over 20 million egg–laying chickens died from either culling or the virus in the final quarter of last year.
More recently, on January 17, 2025, HPAI was detected for the first time in a commercial poultry flock in Georgia, the top producer of poultry in the U.S., deepening concerns about the struggle to contain the prolonged outbreak.
Too Indemnified to Fail: How Payments Can Incentivize Risk
The indemnity system was designed to incentivize producers to adopt practices that help curb the spread of the virus. As APHIS states, the payments are intended to “encourage prompt reporting of certain high consequence livestock and poultry diseases and to incentivize private biosecurity investment.” Biosecurity measures include a range of practices to prevent disease outbreaks, from latching dumpster lids and disinfecting equipment to more expensive measures, like installing netting and screens on barns to deter wild birds.
These biosecurity measures are especially critical given that H5N1 is most commonly introduced to poultry flocks through wild birds, according to a 2023 epidemiology analysis conducted by APHIS. The virus’s transmission from wild birds can happen either directly, or indirectly through contaminated feed, clothing and equipment.
By sheltering producers from risk, researchers have observed that indemnity payouts can, under some circumstances, inadvertently encourage lapses in biosecurity, enabling the spread of disease. And this can potentially create a system where farms are too indemnified to fail — the risks of operating a business highly susceptible to disease are absorbed by the government.
“What we are finding is that ‘unconditional indemnity’ disincentivizes livestock producers to adopt biosecurity because they know that if the disease strikes their system then they would be indemnified,” Asim Zia, a professor of public policy and computer science at the University of Vermont who researches livestock disease risk, tells Sentient. According to Zia, “unconditional indemnity” means indemnity payments with next-to-no requirements to qualify.
It remains to be seen whether APHIS’s new interim guidelines — which will require that some high-risk producers successfully pass a biosecurity audit prior to receiving indemnity — will be enough to remedy this issue and encourage producers to change. Unlike the previous system, the new audits will include a visual inspection of the premises, either virtually or in-person. However, the scope of the new rule is limited to large-scale commercial poultry facilities that have been previously infected with HPAI, or that are moving poultry onto a poultry farm in a “buffer zone,” a higher-risk region.
Other large-scale commercial facilities will still follow the earlier rule’s more lenient audit process. This requires an audit of a producers’ biosecurity plan on paper — not an inspection of the actual poultry farm — every two years. It has been remarkably easy for farmers to pass this audit: the failure rate of this program was zero, according to APHIS, which made it so there were effectively no strings attached to the payouts. And smaller-scale poultry operations are entirely off the hook, exempt from both rules, and even from developing a biosecurity plan.
In the past, APHIS has repeatedly bailed out many of the same poultry businesses, spending $227 million on indemnity payments to farms that have been infected with H5N1 multiple times. This has included 67 poultry businesses that have been affected at least twice, and 19 companies that have been infected at least three times, according to the agency’s own records.
APHIS has not released the names of the companies that have been repeatedly infected, though the indemnity payments provide a glimpse into this.
Take Cal-Maine Foods’ poultry farm in Farewell, Texas. On April 2, 2024, Texas’s Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller announced its flock tested positive for H5N1, requiring the culling of 1.6 million laying hens and 337,000 pullets. The very next day Cal-Maine Foods, headquartered in Mississippi, received an indemnity payment of $17 million for HPAI detected on the Texas operation, according to government spending data.
The Poultry Industry’s Risky Expansion
Last November, Cal-Maine Foods’ executives joined other business leaders across industries at an annual investment conference, ringing in the year on an optimistic note. As avian flu decimated flocks, the company’s top executives were focused on the future.
“We still think there’s going to be good opportunity to grow,” Max Bowman, Cal-Maine Foods’ vice president and CFO, told business leaders. “We got a playbook for the whole market. And so right now, things are great, but we think we can continue to build this company,” which, as it stands, controls one-fifth of the domestic egg market in the U.S.
The company is already in the process of building five new cage-free facilities, adding 1 million hens to their flock, in Florida, Georgia, Utah and Texas.
Bowman, Cal-Maine’s Vice President, did not reply to Sentient’s request for comment.
Other poultry companies are expanding too. For instance, Demler Farms in San Jacinto, California is building a triple-story egg operation right next to a dairy farm, which is also susceptible to the avian flu now that it has spread to cattle. Adding to this risk, the San Jacinto Valley is a critical habitat for migratory water birds, the primary hosts of avian flu.
Most of California’s cases of avian flu in poultry have been clustered along this water bird migratory route, known as the Pacific Flyway. Yet this appears to not be enough of a deterrent for Demler Farms’ expansion. As Heath observed, this risk is softened by the indemnity payment system, ready to bail out infected poultry farms by the millions.
Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email