Current Events > Egg demand shifted, and 61,000 Minnesota chickens were euthanized

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https://www.startribune.com/egg-demand-shifted-and-61-000-minnesota-chickens-were-euthanized/569817312/

Kerry Mergen, a contract egg farmer near Albany, Minn., got word on a Wednesday the chickens in his barn would be euthanized. A crew showed up the next morning and started gassing the birds with carbon dioxide. The sudden drop in demand for food at restaurants, school cafeterias and caterers shut down by the pandemic has ripped through farming. Milk has been dumped, eggs smashed and ripe lettuce plowed under. Now, farms are killing animals sooner than planned. A primary destination for eggs from the flock a Cargill Inc. fluid egg plant in Big Lake, Minn. temporarily shut down last week and laid off 300 employees there. The company cited declining demand for the decision to idle the facility, which handles 800 million eggs a year and sends containers of fluid egg to food-service companies across North America.

Demand for eggs in grocery stores is high and the price of a dozen eggs has risen. But much of the egg-production system is built to provide fluid eggs to food service companies and changing farms to provide eggs for retail is neither simple nor quick. Mergen said his was one of five egg farms where chickens were euthanized in Minnesota in recent weeks, and that the other four were larger than his farm. On April 9 at 6:30 a.m., Mergen said, a crew of about 15 workers showed up with carbon dioxide to euthanize the chickens and semitrailers to haul away the carcasses. They come in with carts, put them all in carts, wheel them up to the end, put a hose in that cart and gas them, then dump them over the edge into a conveyor and convey them up into semis and the semis haul them out, Mergen said. I was in there for quite a while and the longer I was there the more disgusted and disappointed I was knowing that Im not going to see anything put back in my checkbook again, so after a while I just simply left. By nightfall the chickens were gone, taken to a rendering plant to be turned into dog food, and so was the Mergens income from a business theyve been running for 22 years.

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RIP Chickens

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7 billion chicks are ground up alive every year because they have no use for the males.

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Sounds like a real stupid and cruel thing to do
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lilORANG posted...

Sounds like a real stupid and cruel thing to do

So close to a revelation here.

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ASithLord7 posted...

chicks are ground up

I think I have seen a video of this. It is very disturbing.

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lilORANG posted...

Sounds like a real stupid and cruel thing to do

Well you see, the corporations couldn't find a way to profit off them.

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What's crazy is that every grocery store in my area has limits on how many eggs and milk you can buy.

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I dont believe a single word of this

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Perfectinsanity posted...

I dont believe a single word of this

Why would you disbelieve this when

ASithLord7 posted...

7 billion chicks are ground up alive every year because they have no use for the males.

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What a good system we have here.

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I was in there for quite a while and the longer I was there the more disgusted and disappointed I was knowing that Im not going to see anything put back in my checkbook again, so after a while I just simply left.

Certainly, he is the real victim in all this.

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ASithLord7 posted...

Why would you disbelieve this when

Because I work in an agricultural field. There is always use for products that don't meet expectations or demand. Millions of heads of lettuce wouldn't just be categorically plowed under; the labor and resources have already gone into growing them, something else could and would be done with them.

In regards for the chickens, it's only a matter of time before they're needed again, if in fact they're not needed now. Restaurants are still operational if they're smart enough to offer delivery options, and grocery store shelves in my area are usually empty of dairy products.

I'm sure you have some PETA-esque agenda you're trying to push, and I'm sure that plenty of animals are killed each year when they outlive their usefulness. But this just seems like fear-mongering and pot-stirring to enrage a certain demographic.

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Not really appropriate, but I read that as Minotaur chickens.

RIP, poultry. :(

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I wonder if this is relevant

https://youtu.be/X9wHzt6gBgI

Chicken farmers are pretty much stuck with a larger company dictating how they run their farm.
If they want to gas them the next day, theyll gas them.

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Yeah regular treatment of chicken that we use as food is like 100x worse than chickens raised for cock fighting.
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Perfectinsanity posted...

Because I work in an agricultural field. There is always use for products that don't meet expectations or demand. Millions of heads of lettuce wouldn't just be categorically plowed under; the labor and resources have already gone into growing them, something else could and would be done with them.

There's a link in the article that explains why they did it.

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ASithLord7 posted...

7 billion chicks are ground up alive every year because they have no use for the males.

Wut

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Capitalism is so efficient.

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Perfectinsanity posted...

Because I work in an agricultural field. There is always use for products that don't meet expectations or demand. Millions of heads of lettuce wouldn't just be categorically plowed under; the labor and resources have already gone into growing them, something else could and would be done with them.

In regards for the chickens, it's only a matter of time before they're needed again, if in fact they're not needed now. Restaurants are still operational if they're smart enough to offer delivery options, and grocery store shelves in my area are usually empty of dairy products.

I'm sure you have some PETA-esque agenda you're trying to push, and I'm sure that plenty of animals are killed each year when they outlive their usefulness. But this just seems like fear-mongering and pot-stirring to enrage a certain demographic.

You ignored the second part of my post

BignutzisBack posted...

Wut

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

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Lvaneede posted...

RIP Chickens

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NinjaWarrior455 posted...

Well you see, the corporations couldn't find a way to profit off them.

We're next

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ASithLord7 posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

:(

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