Hurricane Helene damaged chicken farms, killed animals and made reconstruction difficult

Hurricane Helene, the Category 4 storm that hit the southeastern United States over the weekend, has killed more than 110 people — and likely millions of chickens.

Nearly half of the more than 9 billion chickens raised for meat in the United States, known as “broiler” chickens, are raised and slaughtered in the region. Georgia is the largest chicken producer in the country, processing 1.3 billion chickens annually. Over the weekend, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters that 107 poultry plants in the state were “damaged or completely destroyed by the storm.”

The Georgia Department of Agriculture did not respond to questions about the exact number of chickens that died during Hurricane Helene. But considering that poultry companies typically pack between 20,000 and 52,000 chickens into each coop, which can be nearly twice the length of a football field, an estimated 2.14 to 5.56 million birds have died. (The actual total may be slightly different as some birds may have survived the damage and some coops may have been temporarily empty as companies clear them out for a few weeks between flocks.)

Some of the country's largest poultry companies – including Aviagen, Pilgrim's Pride and Wayne-Sanderson Farms – have suspended operations at their local plants in recent days due to power outages. A spokesperson for Clemson University's agriculture program told Vox that while the situation is uncertain and damage from the hurricane is still being assessed, 45,000 chickens died at a South Carolina poultry plant due to a generator failure.

Virtually all chickens raised for meat in the United States are confined to these sprawling warehouses, which bear no resemblance to the small barns of America's agricultural past. These factory farms often have at least several stables in which hundreds of thousands of birds are housed on one site at the same time. If enough facilities are compromised in a natural disaster like Hurricane Helene, millions of animals could die, and their final moments will likely be frightening and painful.

Their deaths also threaten the economic health of farmers and the poultry industry. Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper has asked for immediate federal relief for the state's agricultural sector.

When hurricanes strike factory farms, they can also wash untold amounts of animal manure into groundwater or rivers and streams, exacerbating the challenges faced by governments and their residents as a result of violent storms.

Hurricane Helene is the latest – but not the first – high-profile and explosive example of how our factory farming system imposes enormous cruelty on animals and also endangers human health. The industry has no reason to change even after a disaster like this, as taxpayers bear much of the economic losses incurred by meat companies due to natural disasters.

This is far from the first time a hurricane has struck the Southeast's poultry industry. This has happened several times over the last quarter century, at a time when Big Ag has only increased its focus on building more and larger factory farms.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd flooded much of eastern North Carolina, killing an estimated 2.4 million chickens, 100,000 pigs and half a million turkeys. Pig farms in North Carolina store the animals' waste in vast manure “lagoons,” several of which overflowed during Floyd, releasing toxic sludge containing bacteria and viruses (including E. coli) into waterways and drinking water, according to the state's climate change office.

In chicken factories, manure is stored in huge pits or large mounds, creating a similar pollution risk to pig farms.

Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018 also caused devastating damage in North Carolina, killing millions of chickens and thousands of pigs. Later that same year, Hurricane Michael destroyed over 80 chicken coops in Georgia that housed more than 2 million chickens.

Manure can leach into groundwater and contaminate private wells that many rural communities rely on as a source of drinking water – a constant concern that becomes even greater after severe storms.

Despite this history, the poultry and pork industries have not done much to mitigate the risks of natural disasters, such as keeping fewer animals on their farms or changing the way they handle the enormous amounts of manure their animals produce , has fundamentally changed. That's because U.S. taxpayers are footing much of the cost, both for environmental cleanup and for the dead chickens and pigs.

When natural disasters strike a typical chicken farm, the meat company — which actually owns the chickens, not the farmer — receives $3 per adult bird from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 75 percent of the bird's market value. The farmer who supplies the meat packer only receives 33 cents per bird.

Many chicken farmers, most of whom raise chickens on contract for meat companies, are already working under precarious economic conditions. Hurricanes and other natural disasters can make the situation even worse.

The federal government also reimburses economic losses caused by other severe weather events such as heat waves and cold snaps and disease outbreaks. In the past two years, a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu — known as H5N1 — has caused the deaths of more than 100 million poultry birds, and the federal government has donated well over $1 billion to the poultry industry, much of it in donations to the largest corporations.

Animal production is both a key driver of climate change and, as Hurricane Helene shows, a victim of it. As global warming increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, policymakers should question the factory farming model. Instead, we are redoubling our efforts and raising more and more animals on ever larger farms, as a recent federal audit of the US agricultural system shows.

“In addition to all the environmental problems associated with the factory farming model and the public health problems it causes, the extreme concentration of animals is ultimately just a fundamental vulnerability,” said Chris Hunt, deputy director of the nonprofit Socially Responsible Project Agriculture. “It's a vulnerability to unexpected shocks in the system…The fact that poultry isn't just focused on that [factory farms]but is also geographically concentrated is certainly problematic.”