BYE BYE, BIRDIE

Another chicken ranch bit the dust today, this one in Bryan, Texas at Feather Crest Farms. A “large explosion” occurred followed by a huge fire, which has been responded to by “multiple US agencies”, meaning that every available fire-fighting resource has been sent to fight the fire., which has totally destroyed the chicken ranch.

This chicken ranch is, or WAS, one of the largest in our nation, with a total of 11 million hens producing approximately 9.35 million eggs a day. If you think that’s not going to create another egg shortage and leap in prices, think again. Americans eat about 300 million eggs a day, but the egg producers are spread across a very large country. This ranch supplied about a third of Texas’s eggs, which are already high priced. Now that price is going a lot higher.

It’s a rough life being a chicken as it is, without the constant war on chicken ranches, blowing them up and burning them down in our government’s efforts to make food, especially meat, scarcer and scarcer. Since CHICKEN is the single most popular meat source and the cheapest, it’s naturally the target of choice to eliminate, followed by beef. The critter killers got a break last summer when Nature stepped with a major drought that resulted in much of our beef herds being culled, so they didn’t have to find ways to kill the cattle. Mama Nature did it for them.

There’s still pigs, though. I don’t hear anything about pig farms being destroyed yet, and that may be because most pigs are raised outdoors and eat garbage, like outdated vegetables collected and sold to the farmers by grocery stores. There’s not much to blow up or burn down there. There is a Swine Flu that can be deliberately spread, and other diseases that make them unfit to eat, so I’m sure their turn is coming.