From his office about 165 miles away, Ron Kean can’t help but wonder what the heck just happened to a chicken processing plant in Charles City, Iowa, that left farmers, veterinary health professionals, and agricultural leaders in three states scrambling.
“It's a bad situation,” Kean told American Farmland Owner from his office in Madison, where he serves as a faculty associate and extension specialist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal & Dairy Sciences.
Ron Kean bio:
Wisconsin Poultry & Egg Industries Association -- secretary/treasurer
Midwest Poultry Consortium Center of Excellence – course instructor
Midwest Poultry Consortium COE Faculty Member of the Year – 2022
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal & Dairy Sciences -- faculty associate and extension specialist
“Fortunately, it's very rare that we have something like this.”
It was fortunately an unusual occurrence. But unfortunately, it brought hardship to farmers across the tri-state region of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
RELATED: Where are producers wasting money in poultry production? Ron Kean shared some thoughts in this video.
Minnesota-based Pure Prairie Poultry abruptly shut down its chicken processing plant, taking with it the previous promise of 400 jobs for the northeast region of Iowa. Farmers were left with hundreds of thousands of chickens – some without the resources to keep feeding them – after the company quit paying the bills.
Two years ago, the company reopened the plant to much fanfare with the locals. The plant had struggled under previous ownership. But optimism flourished when Pure Prairie Poultry stepped in. The U.S. Department of Agriculture kicked in $45 million for the project. The situation, at the time, looked promising.
But the finances never worked for the new group. Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms already hold a sizeable share of the chicken processing market in the United States. Kean acknowledged the difficulty that meant for Pure Prairie Poultry.
“Maybe they weren't quite what they thought they were,” Kean surmised.
Pure Prairie Poultry not only shut down the Charles City plant, but it also took no financial responsibility for nearly two million chickens that regional farmers had been raising and feeding for the company. The expectation, of course, had been that the company would ultimately get the birds for the processing plant.
But the checks stopped coming, and the worry started mounting.
Some farmers turned to Facebook for help. Farmers didn’t want to see the birds starve to death. But some were stuck with outstanding bills from the company for tens of thousands of dollars.
The company owned the chickens but wouldn’t pick them up or pay to feed them either.
RELATED: Wisconsin Public Radio aired a story about chicken farmers turning to Facebook with the hope that people would buy or agree to take some of the chickens for free, so the birds wouldn’t have to be destroyed. Some birds had resorted to eating other chickens to avoid starvation. Listen to the story here.
United Poultry Concerns, a domestic fowl welfare organization, put out an alert for followers to pick up some of the Wisconsin chickens, so they wouldn’t all get destroyed. See that alert here.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture went to U.S. District Court, so that it could take control of the 1.3 million chickens that were within its borders. It was the only state of three impacted with a system in place for an emergency like this.
RELATED: The Charles City Press followed the court action for the Iowa Department of Agriculture to step in and try to save the chickens in the state that Pure Prairie Poultry said it could no longer afford. Read that story here.
Kean, whose family raised chickens on their Nebraska farm when he was a kid, said that the situation at the Charles City plant reminded him of what happened when COVID-19 first struck in 2020 in the United States.
Some of the processing plants shut down, leaving producers with hogs and no market for them. “The swine industry felt like they had pigs, that there was nowhere to go with them.”
