Chicken Farmers Blame ‘Tainted Feed’ After Hens Stop Producing Eggs

Chicken farmers took to social media to blame their commercial chicken feed for their hens’ decreased egg output.

QUICK FACTS:
  • In several viral videos circulating the internet recently, farmers have been unanimously speculating that commercial feed is the reason their chickens haven’t produced as many eggs this year.
  • While the winter naturally halts egg production due to the colder weather, farmers have claimed their chickens haven’t regularly laid eggs since last July.
  • “I have called multiple farms that sell chickens and they are telling me that their chickens have stopped laying eggs and therefore they do not have any for sale,” one farmer wrote in a Facebook post. “I looked into it a little further and apparently they are putting something in the feed to stop them from being able to lay eggs!”
  • One egg farmer explained that her chickens haven’t laid a single egg with the commercial feed she had been giving the birds, but suddenly once she let them free range they began laying again.
  • “Everybody who has been feeding their chickens this type of feed has stopped getting eggs altogether,” the farmer said. “So people who aren’t able to let their chickens free range, aren’t getting any eggs. Kinda convenient when eggs are the price of… gold at this point?”
CHICKEN FARMER ON NO LONGER GIVING HER BIRDS COMMERCIAL FEED:

“In nearly 30 something years of raising chickens I have never gone without eggs, not even just one and since before Halloween I have not gotten a single egg until about a week ago, and I switched the feed I was giving. I no longer am feeding chicken feed,” the farmer said.

BACKGROUND:
  • Last weekend more than 100 firefighters responded to a raging fire that ultimately killed 100,000 chickens at an egg farm in Bozrah, Connecticut.
  • The fire comes as the U.S. Agriculture Department blames soaring egg prices on over 58 million birds dying from influenza in the United States.
  • The widespread shortage across the country has shot up prices 60% higher from just one year ago.
  • In May 2022, thousands of chickens were killed at an egg processing plant in Wright County, Minnesota.
  • “Overnight, a fire destroyed one of our barns at our Howard Lake farm,” a Formsman Farms spokesman said at the time. “No one was injured, and we are grateful that first responders were quickly on scene to put out the fire.”
  • “Unfortunately, chickens were lost because of the fire. We are evaluating the extent of the damage — which appears to be confined to a single structure — as well as investigating the cause of the fire.”

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