At midnight sooner or later in spring 2023, a crew of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto an enormous hen farm on Maryland’s Jap Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was elevating some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest hen firm.
When the investigator Joseph Allman entered one of many facility’s sprawling barns, he discovered chickens packed wall to wall, together with three useless, decaying birds. The place smelled “terrible and noxious,” he mentioned, and as he waded via the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman discovered lots extra useless animals. Proper outdoors the barn, Allman informed me lately, there was an enormous pile of manure “utterly suffering from useless our bodies and physique elements.”
Over the next yr, the investigators returned to the farm and likewise visited one other operation within the space elevating birds for Mountaire, the place they discovered related circumstances. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there have been a number of birds “unable to succeed in meals or water resulting from extreme limb deformity and illness, or as a result of they’re caught on their backs and unable to rise up.” A number of useless birds, the footage confirmed, had been “left to decompose for days to weeks,” based on Rosenberg.
The investigators additionally obtained a trove of inspection paperwork from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses via a Freedom of Info Act request, which revealed cases of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to demise, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.
Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US legal professional, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the circumstances documented represent legal animal cruelty beneath Maryland state legislation. The activists have despatched Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary evaluation to a variety of county and state authorities requesting an investigation into the corporate and fees for animal cruelty. They haven’t obtained a lot curiosity.
Mountaire alleges that early one morning in mid-February, Allman and his colleague Adam Durand posed as AT&T contractors to achieve entry to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They had been later arrested for legal impersonation — a cost which was quickly dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to take away the cost from their data in alternate for one yr of no contact with Mountaire, Allman informed me. Mountaire sued the 2 in early March for trespassing.
“This lawsuit isn’t about defending their enterprise — it’s about silencing whistleblowers,” Allman wrote to me in response to the lawsuit. Durand declined to touch upon the lawsuit.
Mountaire Farms declined an interview request for this story, however emailed an announcement to Vox. The corporate mentioned it requires its contract farmers to “comply with sound poultry administration practices that conform to practices of fine animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to remark additional on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.
Nevertheless grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re removed from uncommon. At US hen manufacturing unit farms, overcrowded, unhygienic circumstances are so widespread that 6 % of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens which have been bred to be unhealthily giant — die on the farm every year earlier than they will even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That provides as much as greater than half a billion pointless deaths.
The alleged circumstances on Mountaire’s hen amenities present one of many main ills of the manufacturing unit farming system within the US, one shared by different corporations within the business: an virtually willful disregard for the welfare of the animals they increase. However Mountaire additionally demonstrates to a better extent than another poultry firm a much less extensively recognized method by which the manufacturing unit farming system’s tentacles work their method into American life: the business’s ties to a right-wing, deregulatory political agenda.
Whereas Republican politicians and meat corporations have lengthy been intertwined — virtually 80 % of the business’s political contributions within the 2024 election cycle went to Republicans — Mountaire and its rich however little-known CEO Ronald Cameron present simply how deep these ties can go. Cameron, who at occasions has been a prime donor to President Donald Trump, far outspends others within the poultry business in an obvious effort to bend US politics towards his hard-right beliefs, and seemingly to guard and broaden a poultry empire that produces roughly 1 out of each 13 chickens consumed in America immediately, even when comparatively few folks have ever heard of it.
How Mountaire Farms has fueled a right-wing enterprise and political agenda
In 2016, Cameron and his spouse gave thousands and thousands to Trump-aligned PACs, which made him one of many largest donors to Trump. Throughout the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, Cameron gave one other $4.7 million.
Cameron has additionally contributed to a number of present and former Home Freedom Caucus members and far-right Senate candidates, in addition to over $14 million to political motion committees (PACs) linked to the Koch Brothers and over $2 million to PACs operated by the Membership for Progress.
All informed, Cameron has given round $75 million to candidates, PACs, and state events since 2014 — over 99 % of it to Republicans — making him one of many 50 largest political contributors in latest election cycles.
Whereas the course of Cameron’s {dollars} isn’t uncommon within the meat business, the dimensions of giving dwarfs that of his rivals. Since 1990, the biggest hen corporations have given — via their workers — something from tens of 1000’s to a couple million {dollars} every, with related spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it ought to be famous, doesn’t spend on lobbying in any respect.) The one firm that comes shut is Tyson Meals, which has spent $35 million on lobbying since 1998 and whose workers have given roughly $7.7 million to political candidates and organizations since 1990. Nevertheless, Tyson Meals is a a lot greater firm than Mountaire, with 20 occasions the annual income. It’s a prime producer of beef and pork, too.
All of the whereas, based on Glassdoor wage reporting, Mountaire Farms’ frontline slaughterhouse workers make minimal wage or barely above it to carry out one of the vital harmful jobs in America. Mountaire employees have accused the corporate of retaliation, discrimination, denial of toilet breaks, union-busting, wage-fixing, and publicity to dangerous chemical substances. In 2020, an worker interviewed by the New Yorker known as the work “slavery.” Mountaire didn’t reply to Vox for a request for remark about allegations made by its workers.
The corporate has additionally been accused of making extreme environmental air pollution. In 2021, Mountaire agreed to a historic $205 million deal to settle a lawsuit alleging that considered one of its slaughterhouses had contaminated the ingesting water and air high quality of close by residents. “Whereas Mountaire doesn’t imagine that it brought about any harm to any of the plaintiffs, it selected to settle the case so as to obtain a remaining decision and to permit development of a brand new wastewater therapy plant to proceed,” the corporate mentioned in an announcement on the time.
Environmental air pollution is a constant downside for the meat business, and Cameron’s political generosity has coincided with helpful political motion for Mountaire on precisely that topic.
In Maryland, the place companies are restricted from giving political candidates giant sums of cash, Mountaire funneled $250,000 into the Republican Governors Affiliation days earlier than the 2014 election, which it spent on adverts to elect Republican Maryland governor Larry Hogan.
On inauguration day, Hogan rescinded laws pertaining to how a lot animal manure will be unfold onto crop fields as fertilizer — a infamous supply of water air pollution on Maryland’s Jap Shore, the place Allman and his colleagues investigated Mountaire hen operations. Weeks later, Hogan proposed a watered-down model with a loophole for the poultry business. A spokesperson for Hogan informed the Wall Road Journal that Hogan “had no information of [Mountaire’s] involvement with the Republican Governors Affiliation.”
In the midst of April 2020, Trump picked Cameron to function an financial adviser to the White Home on its technique to reopen elements of the economic system within the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump signed an government order mandating that slaughterhouses stay open to their extent attainable, whilst they grew to become Covid sizzling spots — together with Mountaire slaughterhouses.
That very same day, the Division of Labor issued an announcement that basically immunized meat corporations from being held accountable in the event that they didn’t adhere to the US Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s Covid-19 tips as long as that they had at the very least demonstrated a “good religion” effort to take action. Across the similar time, the US Division of Agriculture permitted 15 slaughterhouses — together with considered one of Mountaire’s — to hurry up their slaughter strains from 140 birds per minute to 175.
Why the meat business provides a lot to Republicans
Mountaire could stand out within the dimension of its contributions to right-wing politicians and teams, however the broader meat and dairy business provides overwhelmingly to Republicans.
The business’s political favoritism will be defined partially by geography; animal agriculture is concentrated in rural states the place politicians are more likely to be Republican. Nevertheless it will also be defined partially by ideology; Congressional Republicans are inclined to want deregulation, which advantages meat, dairy, and egg corporations.
Cameron and his firm — alongside together with his rivals — profit from deregulation at every hyperlink within the provide chain that Congress and regulatory companies might change however don’t. Poultry farms are exempt from quite a few animal welfare legal guidelines and are largely exempt from key environmental legal guidelines. The Division of Labor, throughout Republican and Democrat administrations, has didn’t maintain slaughterhouse abuses in examine. Numerous the farmers that increase chickens for large poultry corporations get screwed over, too.
However whereas Republicans could financially profit disproportionately from the business’s largesse, Democrats are typically something however powerful on the meat business.
“Whereas conservatives have persistently pushed extra aggressive, pro-agribusiness insurance policies,” meals coverage professional Nathan Rosenberg and journalist Bryce Wilson Stucki wrote in a 2017 story for The Counter, “liberals have usually responded with pro-agribusiness insurance policies of their very own, even when that meant undermining their very own pure allies: small and mid-sized farmers, farm employees, rural minority populations, and the small, impartial companies they assist.” I noticed that actuality myself once I wrote final yr concerning the cozy relationship between the meat business and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s VP decide.
There’s no clear path to breaking the meat business’s grip over American politics on the horizon, however there’s something anybody can do — beginning immediately — to push again in opposition to the sorts of horrific allegations made in opposition to Mountaire and different poultry giants: Eat much less hen.
In 2022, the US raised and slaughtered a record-breaking 9.2 billion of them — 24 per individual after accounting for poultry exports. Rooster could also be branded as a more healthy, extra sustainable various to beef and pork, however its mass manufacturing and consumption — whether or not from Mountaire or its rivals — depends on unimaginable human and animal struggling.
“We’re up in opposition to a extremely large system that appears actually entrenched proper now,” mentioned Durand, one of many activists, “and we’re simply making an attempt to do no matter we are able to to disrupt that.”
