Workers put the chickens in carts, put a hose in that cart and gassed them. Then they were dumped into a conveyor and hauled to a rendering plant to be turned into dog food.
ADAM BELZ: 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… Kerry Mergen, a contract egg farmer near Albany, Minn., got word the chickens in his barn would be euthanized. A crew showed up the next morning and started gassing the birds with carbon dioxide… Mergen said he initially couldn’t believe it when a field manager from Daybreak Foods, the Lake Mills, Wis.-based firm that owned and paid to feed the flock of 61,000 birds, said they might be killed early. His contract called for the flock to produce eggs until fall…
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 I’m 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 they’ve been running for 22 years… 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… The practice is not uncommon, particularly with hens whose egg-laying productivity is up after about two years. But the decision to cull animals while they are still productive is rare. SOURCE…
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