Egg demand shifted, and 61,000 Minnesota chickens were euthanized

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) ^ | April 21, 2020 | Adam Belz

[ProtectOurFreedom]

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.

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. “I was wrong and the company decided to do it anyway,” Mergen said.

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.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

[continues...]

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.

Barb Mergen, Kerry’s wife "...it’s just that someone can come in so quickly and when they euthanized the birds, that was our paycheck euthanized.”

The couple could start an egg business that sells to grocery stores, but they don’t have the equipment to grade eggs for the retail market and there are other financial obstacles to building their own flock and feeding it.

The swiftness of the decision to wipe out the flock is still shocking to the Mergens nearly two weeks later. A representative of Daybreak didn’t return a call for comment. “They didn’t confide in us, they didn’t ask us, they didn’t care about what effect this would have on us,” Barb said. “Our contract says at least a seven-day written notice. That’s not much, but it’s more than this. We just feel like we’re a nobody at the end.”

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I'm disappointed that President Trump hasn't been able to squeeze the FDA to relax food regulations so that farmers who were selling to the commercial & restaurant markets could quickly get their product into the retail supply chain. Meanwhile our markets here in the San Francisco Bay Area are restricting egg purchases to one dozen per shopper per visit! Pre-COVID, something like HALF of all food was sold in restaurants and take-out; now most of that has shifted to supermarkets. I believe the supply chain could be adapted quickly if the government would get out of the way and eliminate regulations designed for a stable, COVID-free economy.

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Greta says "I WARNED you about CO2! See how dangerous it is? It killed these poor, defenseless birds and it will kill US!!"

[frank ballenger]

Not that I want them to die but the chickens could be shown a big picture of Greta scowling. They’d drop on the spot.

[ptsal]

The egg shelves at several local grocery stores are nearly empty.

[Secret Agent Man]

Honestly waste of good chickens.

Too lazy to advertise and try to encourage people to buy eggs as well. More are at home baking and cooking.

And you cant just replace millions of birds across the country in a heartbeat when demand goes up.

[Starcitizen]

How much of our food chain has filthy Communist Chinese tentacles all over it? Inquiring minds want to know..,

First employment crisis
Now food crisis.

Communist China is winning without firing a shot.

[Darksheare]

Reminds me of the mindless waste of communism.

[frank ballenger]

One of the news source propaganda sites (can’t remember maybe MSN?) had a link to worldwide famines will kill millions due to the economic destruction caused by the virus reaction.

Killing the chickens could be like the famous film clips of farmers pouring milk down the drain to keep prices up in the 1930s. Farmers never recovered from the publicity. Only now viral videos.

If the choice is a consumer paying 40 cents for a gallon of gas or twelve cents for a dozen eggs, who is going to stay in business to provide those for the people to buy? No one. Texas oil producers and processors won’t work for free. Neither can farmers.

[Steely Tom]

There was a story here on FR some years ago about an owner of sled dogs up in northern Canada (Yellowknife, I think) that shot one hundred dogs because market conditions changed. I don’t remember the precise backstory, but I think he ran sled expeditions into the wilderness. There was a recession, and demand dried up. The dogs needed to be fed meat; this cost him a lot of money.

[SkyDancer]

Imagine some poor guy/husband coming home to that - late? That is of course she did live with one. Or maybe ....

[vladimir998]

Personally, I hate this sort of thing. I understand the economics of it, but the waste of it bothers me.

I always thought in a situation like this we should be storing away “excess” food for a time when we would not have food.

[George from New England]

Here in Florida Publix is gouging on the price of chicken breast ...
5.99/lb and climbing

[ConservativeMind]

I’m disappointed that President Trump hasn’t been able to squeeze the FDA to relax food regulations so that farmers who were selling to the commercial & restaurant markets could quickly get their product into the retail supply chain.

Yeah, likewise, I’m still mad Trump hasn’t found a way to make city employees wash my car, get live hogs to a viable, working moon base, and found what was “there” before the Big Bang occurred.

Let’s go protest Trump together!

[eyeamok]

you aint seen nothing yet, the full effect of this catastrophic destruction and intentionally created depression at the hands of our public masters won’t be realized for a few months yet. Hold on Tight!!!

[navysealdad]

There is limit signs at Walmart here.

[Responsibility2nd]

A week ago, you could not find eggs in the store to buy.

And if there were eggs, you were limited to 2 dozen. At $6.99 a dozen.

And now this?

We truly live an a (bleeped) up world.

[Gene Eric]

Nearly forgot about that petulant brat.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

"Too lazy"? The poor guy and his wife were given notice on Wednesday and the killing crew showed up the NEXT MORNING!

They didn't own the birds. They were essentially tenant farmers leasing somebody else's chickens.

You wrote "you cant just replace millions of birds across the country in a heartbeat when demand goes up." -- exactly right! It takes a while to replace that lost livestock. What an utterly ridiculous situation, all because our supply chains and federal regs can't be quickly adjusted to move those eggs to supermarkets. People are lining up for free food all over the country and we are killing livestock.

This happened during the Great Depression, too. You'd think we were smarter than those folks 85 years ago...

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During the early years of the Depression, livestock prices dropped disastrously. Officials with the New Deal believed prices were down because farmers were still producing too many commodities like hogs and cotton. The solution proposed in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was to reduce the supply.

So, in the late spring of 1933, the federal government carried out "emergency livestock reductions." In Nebraska, the government bought about 470,000 cattle and 438,000 pigs. Nationwide, six million hogs were purchased from desperate farmers. In the South, one million farmers were paid to plow under 10.4 million acres of cotton.

The hogs and cattle were simply killed. In Nebraska, thousands were shot and buried in deep pits. Farmers hated to sell their herds, but they had no choice. The federal buy-out saved many farmers from bankruptcy, and AAA payments became the chief source of income for many that year.

[CJ Wolf]

I have eggs from my 9 chickens, had an omelette today. I typically don’t buy eggs. haven’t in a long time.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Re 1930s milk dumping, see my #17 above. That was I immediately thought of, too.

[CJ Wolf]

tractor supply still had baby chicks and turkeys yesterday. was picking up my chicken feed.