April 30, 2020

 

US chicken company kills almost two million chickens

 

 

According to the New York Times, Allen Harim Foods killed nearly two million chickens this month after many of its employees were sidelined by illness or quarantine orders related to the COVID-19, industry officials said.

 

The action by the Delaware-based chicken processing firm was the latest example of how food processors are being affected by the coronavirus, which is keeping workers away because of illness or quarantine. Meat processors, dairy farmers and vegetable growers have shuttered plants or dumped products at a time when many Americans are lining up at food banks or facing scarcity at supermarkets.

 

Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., which represents plants on the Delmarva Peninsula, a 170-mile-long strip of land shared by Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, announced the plans in a memo to its members on April 9, saying the plant was one of many facing difficulties in meeting production targets.

 

"Because of reduced attendance, meat processing companies may need to make the difficult choice to humanely depopulate animals on farms instead of transporting them to plants with reduced processing capacity," Holly Porter, the executive director of the organisation, said in a statement on Tuesday.

 

"One chicken company on Delmarva took this step earlier this month," she said.

 

Porter said the company euthanised nearly two million chickens on farms in Delaware and Maryland using methods approved for cases of infectious avian disease.

 

There are 1,325 growers and five chicken processing companies on the Delmarva Peninsula that operate a total of 10 processing plants.

 

Michele Minton, the director of live operations for Allen Harim Foods, told growers in a letter on April 8 that it would be forced to start depopulating chickens on April 10.

 

Worker attendance was at 50%, meaning the company was no longer able to harvest the amount of birds needed to meet targets, Minton said in the letter, which was published by The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, and other local news organisations. She and other company officials could not be reached for comment.

 

The news of the Delmarva chicken killings, which The Baltimore Sun reported last week, has highlighted the strains on the food supply chain in the US as the virus undermines staffing, either through illness or isolation orders.

 

As workers get sick, plants and producers are casting around for solutions. Beef and pork processors have closed their plants. Farmers are dumping excess dairy products and ploughing unharvested vegetables back into fields or compost.

 

"This is just total waste to me," Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Monday, announcing that the state would purchase dairy products from farmers who had lost important customers as schools, restaurants and hotels have been shuttered.

 

John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, one of the nation's largest meat processing companies, said illnesses and shutdowns were posing new challenges, and depopulating was one of the symptoms.

 

"Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation," Tyson said over the weekend.

 

"Millions of animals—chickens, pigs and cattle—will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities," he said. "The food supply chain is breaking."

 

In March, the National Chicken Council said that it was not seeing any disruptions in production and that there were ample amounts of surplus chicken in cold storage.

 

But nationwide, individual companies are grasping for solutions. Sanderson Farms, a Mississippi-based chicken processor, has explored putting its reduced staff to work packing chicken, but skipping the labour-intensive process of dividing the birds.