It can seem unsettling at first glance.
The majority of your interaction with poultry is at your grocer’s meat counter or at a fast-food drive-thru; the sheer preciseness of the organization of bringing chicken to your table takes an adjustment.
Proponents of the poultry industry don’t like the term “factory farm” because of its pejorative use by animal-rights activist groups. But it’s impossible to deny the industrial nature of the process.
Thursday, industry leaders, food and agribusiness reporters and a few others went on what is called the “Chicken: Farm to Fork Day.” Organized as part of the Chicken Media Summit by the National Chicken Council and the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association, the tour of Sanderson Farms facilities in Kinston and Greene County were part of a three-day national event including sessions in New Bern.
The egg
At the Sanderson farm hatchery on Hill Farm Road, eggs come into a 68-degree Fahrenheit room to control growth, then move into incubation rooms for three weeks — each room containing 9,720 eggs — then to hatchery rooms for three days.
In the hatchery rooms, heat and humidity are tightly regulated for the chicks in trays which rise 15 high. Once hatched, the trays are wheeled into a separation room, where a robotic arm moves the crates off the stack, one-by-one.
The chicks ride a steel-rod conveyor belt, which allows egg shells to drop through or be sucked up by a vacuum. The jostling causes yellow down to rise into the air and coat the floor like an apocalyptic pollen release.
From there, the chicks tumble onto a solid conveyor belt to move into the next room.
The tumble can appear violent for such small creatures.
Wes Hall of Sanderson Farms, leading a tour group, said the vast majority of chicks make it through without a problem.
“That’s something we extremely rarely see,” Hall said, in answer to a question about the instances of chicken mortality.
In the next room, an automated system sorts chicks into four single-file lines, tumbling them into new trays — again, it can be disquieting to the unaccustomed observer. Chicks move into the trays 100 at a time. A sprayer releases a blue-green liquid meant to vaccinate the chicks with an even coating, and a robotic arm loads the trays onto carts for delivery into trucks.
“It’s important to keep them uninjured. We’re trying to raise a healthy bird,” Hall said.
He later added, “Everybody has been taught proper animal welfare practices.”
The chicken
One recipient of chicks from the hatchery is 3 Sons Poultry in Maury, north of Snow Hill. Brooks Edmondson, who owns the farm, has four chicken houses now instead of tobacco. It’s meant as a sustainable option for his sons should any of them decide to return from college and go into farming.
“I have a 13-, 10-, and 7-year-old. This is their future — I hope,” Edmondson said.
On average, with 31,600 chickens per house, the chickens themselves produce an average of about $244,242 in annual revenue.
The chickens reside in houses with a complex and interconnected system of climate control to make sure there’s an optimum range of warmth and humidity. If anything goes wrong, Edmondson and his associates receive alerts on their phones.
After seven weeks, the chickens go to be processed and are in grocery stores within 24 hours, according to Sanderson officials.
“In North Carolina, you’ve got a lot of family farms, like this one,” said Kim Decker, marketing specialist with the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. “Certain organizations will try to tell you these are factory farms, but they’re really family farms. And, multi-generational family farms, where kids go on to college, they’ve built home places, bought land and raised kids and everything else.”
Food fight
In 2012, the group Mercy for Animals led an undercover investigation into so-called factory farms of Butterball turkeys in Eastern North Carolina.
Lenoir County was part of the project.
Activists obtained jobs on the farms and documented what the group says was illegal and unethical treatment of the birds. MFA used the video and accounts on butterballabuse.com and notified local law enforcement of its findings.
A similar operation in 2011 in Hoke County claimed its fifth conviction April 4.
Three other people received convictions for misdemeanor animal abuse and one received a felony conviction, the first in American history for poultry farms.
There’s been a push-back nationwide in state legislatures, through what are called “ag-gag” bills. The bills, including North Carolina’s S.B. 648, seek to make the very thing Mercy for Animals did illegal.
“Chances are that if one of these laws had been in place, we would not have been able to get the footage we did,” Vandhana Bala, general counsel for Mercy for Animals, said in a March story on the online journalism site Vice.
She continued, “We would not have been able to see the government corruption and the illegal activity that is currently being prosecuted if there had been an ag-gag bill in North Carolina.”
Decker said the bill is more to close loopholes and back up current corporate policies.
“It’s not just targeting agriculture in North Carolina. That bill is actually targeting anyone that would get employment by lying on the application, or them going in and doing an illegal activity where at a lot of facilities, it’s against the law, or against company policy to film, regardless.”
He later added, regarding the activists, “You have organizations that don’t like farming period, don’t want animals used for anything.”
Sens. Brent Jackson, R-Sampson, Wesley Meredith, R-Cumberland and Jim Davis, R-Macon, are the primary sponsors of S.B. 648, otherwise known as the “N.C. Commerce Protection Act of 2013.”
The bill received first reading April 3 and was sent to the Senate Commerce Committee.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.