How 3.4 million chickens drowned in Hurricane Florence

While North Carolina is cleaning up the damage caused by Hurricane Florence, the magnitude of the devastation is now at the center of concerns – including for victims who typically receive less attention during disasters. like this one.

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture released a report last week on livestock losses: 3.4 million chickens drowned in Hurricane Florence.

It's a stellar statistic, but livestock losses in numbers are in fact unusual: industrial farming is far more important than most people realize and there are often economic incentives to leave millions behind. of chickens die or even kill them without using their meat.

Most Americans greatly underestimate the number of animals we grow. In 2017, 830 million chickens were slaughtered in North Carolina alone. In 1960, about 1.5 billion chickens were slaughtered in the United States; in 2015, farmers killed nearly $ 9 billion. The increase has largely exceeded the evolution of the population. Around the world, about 50 billion chickens are raised each year for food – almost all on industrial farms – and there are more chickens than any other species of bird.

With farming occurring on this scale, farms, like the ones most people imagine – a family business with a few acres and a henhouse – have become much rarer for the benefit of industrial enterprises. The USDA has found that consolidation occurs differently in animal agriculture than in agriculture. While agricultural agriculture has consolidated at a steady pace over time, the consolidation of the livestock industry is proceeding at a big pace, under the effect of new practices that allow to keep more animals in the same small space.

There have been several changes in this type of practice in recent decades (for example, vitamin D supplements have helped keep birds that never see outside, where they would normally be exposed to light. of the sun). These changes have resulted in significant consolidation of chicken production in particular. The average number of chickens in spawning operations jumped 74.2% in 15 years, and the average egg operation now totals nearly 700,000 chickens. Many, of course, are even bigger – more than a million chickens died in a fire on a single farm in Indiana last year.

Large farms such as this one can hardly evacuate a hurricane and they are not very resistant to other problems either. In 2005, Iowa farms were hit hard by an outbreak of bird flu. It was not financially viable to care for the birds or to separate the infected ones from the healthiest, so state farmers killed millions of birds as soon as the flu was detected, to reduce the spread of the disease.

This has left Iowa farmers struggling to get rid of 26 million dead birds. (Other states have also been affected.) Small farms and family farms have hardly been affected by bird flu, which has prompted some to call it essentially a practice problem. industrial poultry. In Brazil, farmers killed 70 million birds when a truck strike forced them to run out of food.

People who wonder why farmers let the birds drown in hurricane Florence usually fail to imagine the operation of modern chicken farms. With hundreds of thousands of chickens in a typical operation (the meat operations are smaller than the egg production facilities, but still in the hundreds of thousands), the evacuation would not be a matter of d & # 39; Farmer loading his truck. It would be a logistical nightmare.

There are economic incentives to not worry too much about a lot of birds. Birds raised for meat are killed at about six weeks of age. Most of the improvements that would reduce the risk of events like this would simply not be economically viable. Because of the scale of industrial farming, 3 million chickens drown – 30 million deaths to contain diseases – are hardly recorded.

Should someone worry about it? It is not clear that drowning is a worse death for chickens than the usual methods of slaughter. However, the general changes in the industry, which have greatly increased the size of the industry and concentrated the animals on so few farms, are a cause for concern.

Animals may suffer intensely under these conditions. Waste disposal – an extraordinary challenge at this type of scale – is treated irresponsibly. Efforts to keep animals alive under these conditions have resulted in antibiotic resistance. The millions of dead chickens floating in the waters of Florence are just one of the many adverse effects of our current agricultural system and unprecedented scale.