New England’s largest egg farm raided; customers and distributors appalled [View All]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4567.shtml


It takes a lot to get state agriculture officials to raid an established farm in the company of state police. But that’s what the Maine Department of Agriculture did to Quality Egg of New England and Maine Contract Farming in Turner, Maine, on April 1 with a search warrant and in consultation with Androscoggin County prosecutors.

For eight hours law enforcement and agriculture officials entered the ammonia reeking barns on Plains Road where 3 million laying hens are stacked on top of each other over manure pits, gathering photos, shooting video and removing dead and living hens for evidence. The live hens had to be euthanized said state veterinarian, Don Hoenig.

Quality Egg of New England, registered to Mountain Hollow Farms, a division of Radlo Foods and the former infamous DeCoster Egg Farm, produces 21 million eggs a week. Yet to hear their customers tell it, not one of the eggs from the facility where live hens were kicked into manure pits and left to hang by their feet or suffocate in garbage cans went to their stores.

Eggs from the raided farm, stamped 1183 or 1203, were found at Shaw’s, Hannaford and Wal-Mart by the Sun Journal, yet Shaw’s, Hannaford’s and customer Stop & Shop denied doing business with Quality Eggs. Hello?

Even Eggland’s Best -- which has three dedicated barns at one Turner facility site where it feeds hens vegetarian food, but the birds look no better than the others -- whose truck can be seen during the raid, initially denied doing business with Quality Eggs. Later, it announced it was breaking its contract with Radlo Foods that, in turn, vowed to go cage free on the basis of the expose.

Take one look at the video and photos captured by Mercy For Animals (MFA), a national animal protection group, from December 2008 through February 2009, and you’ll see why the grocery stores want to disassociate themselves from the raided egg farm.

-this snip describes the awful conditions for the hens-

Leclerc also noted that Quality Eggs adheres to United Egg Producer guidelines -- which permit battery cages and other cruelty and are largely the reason California’s Proposition 2 passed by such a large margin -- and promised the egg farm will conduct is own investigation.

Maybe they’ll discover they have 3 million hens packed together so tightly they can’t move and they have no veterinarian or humane care.
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it has been almost 30 yrs. since I gave up eating chicken because of the terrible way the hens were kept and treated. also because of the terrible working conditions and pay of the mostly women crew.
and all the antibiotics fed the hens, etc.

I'm glad this company has been raided and hoping more will be raided.

hens deserve better and we deserve healthy eggs from healthy happy hens.

perhaps egg production should also be 'local'.