Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rose Acre Farms, based in Seymour, Indiana, is the second-largest U.S. egg producer.
How often do you think about chickens? If you lived in one of the Midwestern states impacted by the closure of Pure Prairie Poultry’s processing plant last year, you probably thought about chickens a lot. Chickens were everywhere in the news, and in cars or trucks being hauled away from farms in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
Then came skyrocketing egg prices and avian flu rates, and it seemed like the whole nation was thinking about chickens. There were vows not only to import eggs, but also to incorporate eggs laid by broiler chickens.
But there were several million broiler chickens that couldn’t lay any eggs, even with the changes.
When Minnesota-based Pure Prairie Poultry reopened a processing plant in 2022 that had been closed for three years in Charles City, Iowa, it seemed like good news. The town thought so, and so did the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which not only offered $45 million in loans but also $7 million in grants. The plant alone would provide 400 jobs, the company promised.
Two years later, Pure Prairie Poultry would declare bankruptcy, and the Iowa plant would close for good. The losses were only beginning, however, as all farmers holding contracts with the firm would have to forgo revenue from their livestock, while lacking any funds to feed the millions of birds that Pure Prairie Poultry had agreed to feed in their contracts. In Iowa and Minnesota, the states would have to take over care of the birds and, unable to provide for them, were forced to euthanize them. For farmers in Wisconsin like Filla Farms, the state was unable to step in, and while organizations like Pips ’n Chicks were able to launch a social media campaign that succeeded in getting some chickens adopted out and/or given to local organizations, the farmers themselves saw no compensation.
Two firms, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, control 45 percent of the market for broiler chickens in the U.S.
As a result, millions of birds that could have tempered some of the impacts of the avian flu crisis were lost. And the real reason why was the monopoly crisis we see on our nation’s farms.
Pure Prairie Poultry suffered a series of losses after opening the Charles City plant. There were financial difficulties tied to financing, but perhaps the largest contributor was the struggle to secure buyers for the birds in an incredibly small market.
Two firms, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, control 45 percent of the market for broiler chickens in the U.S. and a huge chunk of the international market. Together with Sanderson Farms (which is owned by agricultural giant Cargill) and Perdue, they control over 60 percent of the U.S. market. The other 40 percent is owned by relatively small local processors, like Wisconsin-based Pine Creek Processing, which may only operate seasonally.
This consolidation leaves little room for a mid-level processor like Pure Prairie Poultry to enter the market. The few firms with market power are able to set prices at the farm and at the grocery store, process more and more birds, and exert incredible control over their employees by setting the speed of processing. It also makes the industry incredibly vulnerable to avian flu or other shocks. Even if the dominant companies are able to bear the costs, farmers and consumers may not be able to.
A main reason for this is the lack of farmer control over the flock. Farm Aid has noted that large firms often own the genetic patents on the birds, as well as the birds themselves. They also are responsible for providing the feed and medicine a flock may require. The farmer then becomes bound to a contract where they provide the space for the birds, labor, and utilities, and are responsible for dead birds—including those killed in a cull due to avian flu. As the birds grow, they are shipped to a company-owned processing plant to be slaughtered and prepared for market.
Many of these contracts, although not all, necessitate a method of poultry production that has been criticized for treating the animals like widgets in a factory. Thousands of birds may be housed in the same building, in poor conditions that make them vulnerable to disease. In fact, these facilities—called bird houses—are the norm in the United States. And while poultry expert Ron Kean notes that “some research shows higher mortality in cage-free birds than in caged hens,” the large scale of these operations means that a cull necessitates that many thousands of chickens be killed at once.
A cull assumes that all infected birds will be caught and euthanized before transport or slaughter. Anything less will expose slaughterhouse workers to infected blood and feces, and while they may wear PPE, they also process 140 to 175 birds per minute. These speeds have been criticized for leading to animal cruelty, worker injury, and rushed inspections by animal welfare organizations like Compassion in World Farming. And under President Trump, the USDA has proposed permanent increases in line speeds.
These factors increase the risk that avian flu will jump to workers and their loved ones. The Humane League has argued that “this makes the job of poultry processor one of the most hazardous in the United States during an avian flu outbreak.” At the same time, The Missouri Independent has been following cases of bird flu, noting that not only have there been over 60 known cases in individuals involved in the poultry or dairy industry, but there is real potential for the disease to mutate.
Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
There may be a loss to the firm when chickens must be culled or workers are sickened. But it’s a larger loss to the farmer and the taxpayer. And as the chickens go, so too go the eggs.
Egg-laying hens and those who raise them also face incredible challenges. But they tend to come out ahead of their broiler cousins on most fronts. That’s not to say that the consumer doesn’t see the impacts of bird flu or business mergers when they buy a dozen eggs. CNN notes that five companies now control between 34 and 40 percent of the egg market, and some of those businesses are benefiting from avian flu, rather than being harmed by it.
While Indiana-based Rose Acre Farms was forced to cull over two million egg-laying hens and wait for their facility in Jackson County to test negative, their competitors were able to raise their prices to meet the shortage. This has led to an imbalance in profit, with America’s largest egg producer Cal-Maine Foods posting record profits of 719 percent during the 2023 shortages, after they were sued for price-setting by the state of Texas for allegedly raising prices by 300 percent for no apparent reason.
And while the Trump administration is taking steps to tackle egg price inflation by importing eggs from Turkey, relaxing controls around the poultry industry, and potentially including eggs from the broiler industry for foods that can be pasteurized, like “cake mixes or egg noodles or mayonnaise,” these may be less-than-tenable fixes.
For one thing, imports are a temporary measure. While Ashley Peterson of the National Chicken Council notes that approximately 360 million broiler eggs are thrown out each year, that is hardly enough to balance the shock of a single firm being impacted by a bird flu outbreak. Other measures to treat bird flu, like a hunt for a vaccine and further testing, are continuing, but they are also hampered by the unexpected and apparently accidental firing of USDA staff tasked with responding to avian flu.
Any response to avian flu needs to be ratcheted up, because the virus impacts not only domestic birds, which are easy to track, but wild birds that may then infect other mammals like dairy herds and potentially humans.
Thus far, none of the proposed solutions to avian flu would lead to smaller flocks, better contracts, or more plants. At the same time, farmers are struggling to maintain their livelihoods when a handful of firms are able to set contracts, prices, and conditions that rule the farm and the factory. This industrial-scale production of both broilers and eggs is likely to continue to see industrial-scale outbreaks.
In the meantime, poultry farmers like those at Filla Farms, as well as employees in Charles City, are still waiting for some form of compensation from Pure Prairie Poultry, the USDA, or state governments.
