By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Livestock auctions exist all across North America. They serve as a stop between the farms where animals are born, and the farms where they will be "fattened" or "finished;" the stop between life and death, where animals are sold to be slaughtered. In these fast-paced spaces, animals are pushed through like products - prodded, chased, tossed and dragged - by people paid to get the job done, quickly.
Between late 2022 and early 2024, footage was gathered from over a dozen of these auctions, from across 10 U.S. states by Pete Paxton (Sentient has agreed to use an alias), an undercover investigator with the group Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development, or SEED.
For a recent story for Vox Media, I was tasked with watching this footage, which shows terrified, confused and exhausted animals being handled harshly, or outright abused. Some animals are shown with injuries, while others have already died at auction.
The footage also shows workers with seemingly no regard for the animals' suffering. Some lash out at the animals in frustration, while others laugh at animals in pain.
"Hundreds or even thousands of animals are sold at auctions within hours," Paxton writes on SEED's website, "and workers must keep up the pace to move scared, exhausted, sick and injured animals in and out of pens. Workers experience dehydration, hunger and exhaustion as a result, which often leads to impatience and subsequent abuse."
Writing the Vox story was difficult. The 20-minute compilation of secretly filmed clips initially took me a week to get through; I could only watch for a few minutes at a time before the discomfort became unbearable. But then, over time, something interesting happened: watching the footage became easier for me. And Paxton understands, firsthand, why.
Desensitization and Animal Abuse
Working on the story over a few months, I had to go back to the footage over and over again. As I did, the images and sounds that had once made me gasp and cover my eyes became less horrific. Over time, they even became bearable. I had become desensitized to the animals' pain and fear, a phenomenon common among those who work in animal farming spaces like auctions.
Dr. Philip Tedeschi, a clinical professor at the University of Denver, and an expert in the human-animal connection, explains that for people working in animal farming spaces, empathy can become incompatible with the job, "inefficient" and "inconvenient."
"One of the things we know about studying empathy is that the presence of empathy can be an inhibitor to engaging in the behavior itself," he explains. "If you're required to engage in forcing animals through a meat processing plant, or expected to stick to a very strict timeline," like at auctions or on an assembly line, "you can't afford to be gentle or kind or humane. Then one of the things that's inefficient or incompatible is to have empathy for those individual animals." Emotionally distancing from animals can aid these workers in getting through the work day.
Paxton admits that the work he does as an undercover investigator is "pretty fucking difficult."
"I've had ex-military and ex-law enforcement reach out to me, and they're like, 'I don't know how you do that, because, man, I would lose my shit.'" But Paxton knows he's there to complete an important task, and that allows him to compartmentalize his feelings. "I tell investigators when I train them, 'It's way easier than you think to get used to the abuse, because when you see it there's two things going on in your head: one is, 'Oh, shit, an animal is being abused,' and then the other thing in your head is, 'I have to document that and not get caught.'"
For Paxton, overriding his concerns about the animal abuse he witnesses is an important part of his job as an investigator. For the people who work at animal auctions, Paxton believes desensitization operates much the same way. Abuse of animals at auctions becomes normalized, Paxton reports, as workers are pressured by management to move animals in and out - fast.
The harsh environment forces workers - ranging from inexperienced teens to long-time workers - to handle animals roughly to keep up with the demanding work. They also learn abusive behaviors from each other.
The Mental Health Impact of Working in Animal Agriculture
As part of his investigation, Paxton kept video footage and written records of certain people he met while working at the auctions. On SEED's website, he describes some of these workers as "good people" who "do bad things."
For example, in one small rural town, Paxton met 17-year-old "Audrey." Exhausted and under pressure, she mimicked abusive actions she witnessed from co-workers, reflecting learned behaviors. "As the workday dragged on, her frustrations led her to drag baby lambs and goats by their legs in fits of anger, mirroring the abusive actions she saw around her," Paxton writes. He also recalls "Stewart," a hardworking 20-year-old, dragging goats and jabbing calves with his keys, seeing cruelty as necessary for the job, "a means to an end."
Similar working conditions have also been documented in slaughterhouses, where both workers and animals are known to suffer. Slaughterhouse workers have for decades been documented engaging in extreme cruelty beyond basic animal handling.
For example, a 2018 investigation by Animal Aid uncovered UK slaughterhouse workers beating cows with pipes, while encouraging others to join in. In 2022, Animal Equality documented workers in Brazil kicking, beating and dragging cows by ropes, and twisting their tails to force movement.
Research has shown that the slaughterhouse environment, and the nature of slaughterhouse work itself, can and does have notable psychological impacts on workers. For example, slaughterhouse workers are four times more likely to be clinically depressed than the general public, according to a 2015 study. Higher rates of anxiety, psychosis and serious psychological distress are also found among those working in slaughterhouses, compared to the population at large.
As Dr. Kendra Coulter, now coordinator of Huron University's Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program, told Sentient in 2020: in slaughterhouses, both workers and animals are commodified, "animals literally so." But both are ultimately seen as disposable.
Cultural Impact on Animal Treatment
Upbringing and culture can also play a key role in one's ability to turn off empathy for farm animals. As Tedeschi explained to Sentient on the topic of rodeos, if a person is brought up since childhood to believe that something is "culturally defined as a deserving activity," it becomes normalized.
We see this in rodeo activities geared specifically toward children, such as "pig scrambles" and "mutton busting," where children will ride sheep or other animals, "or engage in wrestling an animal or controlling them in some form," Tedeschi says, "And then getting a lot of attention for that. This is early shaping of those behaviors." Organizations like 4H and Future Farmers of America similarly serve to socialize children to emotionally distance themselves from the animals they are tasked to care for, before selling them to be slaughtered.
Paxton notes that the people he met while working at livestock auctions come from this same wider community. "They're the same people," he says. "They fucking love rodeos." This also includes the police and inspectors on site. "If you're a cop and you're in a rural area, you probably have cows, you've probably kicked them," he says. "Your parents have kicked them, and you're not going to bring charges against a fucking kid or elderly person who does the same thing."
"It's cowboy culture," Renee King-Sonnen, a former cattle rancher turned animal sanctuary operator, told Vox. Cowboy culture involves the normalization of inhumane treatment of animals at auctions, she adds. The drive to belong to that culture is what drives that shared behavior.
"People that are part of this community or this culture feel a solidarity with each other," explains Dr. Rebekah Humphreys, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wales, and an expert in animal ethics. In the case of spaces where animals are farmed, slaughtered, tested on, etc., "the mistreatment of animals," she says, is "reinscribed and perpetuated through cultures. And then anyone that is outside of that norm is criticized as being overly sentimental or anthropomorphic."
Paxton believes that most people working at auctions don't believe they're doing anything wrong when they mistreat animals. "For many of them, it is the right thing, pulling a screaming goat by the ear," he says. "This animal just needs to move, [and] everyone's always done it that way. Does that make me an asshole?" he asks, putting himself in the position of the workers. "Or wouldn't I really be an asshole if I said, 'Everyone stop the entire auction?' If I had to assuage this animal's feelings and recognize this animal as an individual?"
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, both Tedeschi and Humphreys agree that the commodification of farm animals as property, legally and morally, allows places like animal auctions to exist, and for farm animals to be othered so severely. "The industrialization and commodification of [farm animals] has turned them into objects to the extent that we are really quite distanced from them," says Humphreys.
And that distance, Tedeschi believes, prohibits humans from thinking of these animals with more ethical consideration. "We're not likely to see people do a deeper kind of moral investigation into how we interact with other animals, as long as we view them as having the same legal position as the toaster on our counter."
For people like Paxton and me, who exist outside that cowboy culture but are tasked with investigating it, the ability to compartmentalize - to distance ourselves from the natural empathy we feel for animals, in order to get the job done - also reveals just how easily desensitization can happen.
This is in part what allows Paxton to see those who abuse animals at auctions as otherwise good people. "I'm not really scared of these people," he says. "I didn't find them to be violent or terrifying people. They're fucking nice people," he says. As long as you're not a cow.
Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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