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Egg-Producing Flock Destruction Continues

3 min read

(This article has been corrected and clarified. See end for details.)

Remember our story a couple of weeks ago about the contract egg farmers in northwest Arkansas and east Oklahoma whose flocks were being destroyed by the owner?

The only farmer willing to speak to Arkansas Business for attribution, Mitchell Yancey of Westville, Oklahoma, had his birds destroyed last week by contractors hired by the owner, Vital Farms of Austin, Texas.

Witnesses said the 70-week-old birds — Yancey was under contract for 4,600 — were herded into a corner of a barn and covered with a tarpaulin to smother them. Any survivors were gassed or had their necks wrung, the witnesses said.

One witness described the “turning out” of the hens as “the most grotesque, inhumane, sickening thing I’ve seen in my whole damn life.”

Vital Farms CEO Russell Diez-Canseco said Monday that the company had investigated and determined that the destruction of the hens on Yancey’s farm had been handled “consistent with certified humane standards that we follow.”

Tarps are used to control and move flocks, not smother them, and CO2 gas is used to kill them, Diez-Canseco said. Neck-wringing is not part of the process, he said, blaming the “mischaracterization” of what happened on the Yancey farm on “an unhappy farmer and former employee of Vital Farms.”

Karen Christensen, a poultry specialist with the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture, said the use of tarps and gas is not in itself inhumane if properly used.

Christensen said the UA did a trial run with the tarp-and-gas method last year during the avian influenza scare. She said the method can be effective, efficient and humane with chicken houses, such as egg layers, where the birds are roaming freely on the floor.

The tarp can be used to tent off a larger house into a smaller kill zone, which makes the gas more effective.

A northwest Arkansas farmer said the birds Vital Farms took from his chicken house were not killed on his property. He said he spoke with two farmer friends in Arkansas who told him their birds were killed in a similar manner as Yancey’s.

Vital Farms alerted farmers last month that it would stop accepting eggs and turn out the chickens to counter a glut of generic eggs on the market.

“We’ve never been in a situation before where we had more eggs than we needed,” Diez-Canseco said last month. “When you have too many eggs in a market like this, there’s not much you can do with them.”

Vital Farms’ alert was restricted to farmers with contracts that contained a profitability clause carried over from an earlier agreement with Arkansas Egg Co. of Summers (Washington County). Vital Farms bought approximately 35 contracts from Arkansas Egg in November 2014.

(Correction and clarification, Oct. 17, 2016: The destruction of the flock at Mitchell Yancey’s farm was conducted by contractors hired by Vital Farms, not by employees, as was originally reported. Comments from Vital Farms CEO Russell Diez-Canseco that were not available for the original story have been added to clarify the company’s policy on flock destruction.)

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