At midnight someday in spring 2023, a staff of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a large hen farm on Maryland’s Japanese 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 stated, and as he waded by the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman discovered lots extra useless animals. Proper exterior the barn, Allman advised me not too long ago, there was a large pile of manure “utterly suffering from useless our bodies and physique components.”
Over the next yr, the investigators returned to the farm and in addition visited one other operation within the space elevating birds for Mountaire, the place they discovered comparable situations. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there have been a number of birds “unable to achieve meals or water attributable to extreme limb deformity and illness, or as a result of they’re caught on their backs and unable to stand 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 documents from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses by a Freedom of Data Act request, which revealed situations of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to dying, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.
Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US lawyer, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the situations documented represent prison animal cruelty beneath Maryland state regulation. The activists have despatched Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary evaluation to plenty 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 realize entry to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They have been later arrested for prison impersonation — a cost which was quickly dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to take away the cost from their information in change for one yr of no contact with Mountaire, Allman advised 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 a press release to Vox. The corporate stated it requires its contract farmers to “observe sound poultry administration practices that conform to practices of excellent animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to remark additional on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.
Nonetheless grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re far from unusual. At US hen manufacturing unit farms, overcrowded, unhygienic situations are so frequent that 6 % of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens that have been bred to be unhealthily massive — die on the farm annually earlier than they’ll even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That provides as much as greater than half a billion pointless deaths.
The alleged situations on Mountaire’s hen services present one of the major ills of the factory farming system within the US, one shared by different corporations within the business: an nearly willful disregard for the welfare of the animals they elevate. However Mountaire additionally demonstrates to a better extent than another poultry firm a much less broadly recognized approach wherein the manufacturing unit farming system’s tentacles work their approach into American life: the business’s ties to a right-wing, deregulatory political agenda.
Whereas Republican politicians and meat companies have lengthy been intertwined — nearly 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 right this moment, even when comparatively few individuals 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 biggest 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 Development.
All advised, 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 biggest political contributors in current election cycles.
Whereas the route of Cameron’s {dollars} isn’t uncommon within the meat business, the dimensions of giving dwarfs that of his opponents. Since 1990, the biggest hen corporations have given — by their workers — something from tens of hundreds to some million {dollars} every, with comparable spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it must 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. Nonetheless, Tyson Meals is a a lot larger 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 many most dangerous jobs in America. Mountaire employees have accused the corporate of retaliation, discrimination, denial of toilet breaks, union-busting, wage-fixing, and publicity to harmful chemicals. In 2020, an worker interviewed by the New Yorker referred to 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 one in every of its slaughterhouses had contaminated the consuming water and air high quality of close by residents. “Whereas Mountaire doesn’t imagine that it induced any injury to any of the plaintiffs, it selected to settle the case to be able to obtain a ultimate decision and to permit development of a brand new wastewater therapy plant to proceed,” the corporate stated in a statement on the time.
Environmental pollution is a constant drawback for the meat business, and Cameron’s political generosity has coincided with useful political motion for Mountaire on precisely that topic.
In Maryland, the place firms are restricted from giving political candidates massive sums of cash, Mountaire funneled $250,000 into the Republican Governors Association 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 may be unfold onto crop fields as fertilizer — a notorious source of water pollution on Maryland’s Japanese Shore, the place Allman and his colleagues investigated Mountaire hen operations. Weeks later, Hogan proposed a watered-down version with a loophole for the poultry business. A spokesperson for Hogan told the Wall Avenue 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 components of the financial system within the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump signed an govt order mandating that slaughterhouses stay open to their extent potential, whilst they turned Covid hot spots — together with Mountaire slaughterhouses.
That very same day, the Division of Labor issued a statement 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 pointers as long as that they had no less than demonstrated a “good religion” effort to take action. Across the similar time, the US Division of Agriculture permitted 15 slaughterhouses — together with one in every of Mountaire’s — to hurry up their slaughter traces 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 gives overwhelmingly to Republicans.
The business’s political favoritism may be defined partly by geography; animal agriculture is concentrated in rural states the place politicians are more likely to be Republican. However it can be defined partly by ideology; Congressional Republicans are likely to desire deregulation, which advantages meat, dairy, and egg corporations.
Cameron and his firm — alongside together with his opponents — profit from deregulation at each link in the supply chain that Congress and regulatory businesses may 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 failed to maintain slaughterhouse abuses in test. A whole lot of the farmers that elevate chickens for large poultry corporations get screwed over, too.
However whereas Republicans could financially profit disproportionately from the business’s largesse, Democrats are usually something however robust on the meat business.
“Whereas conservatives have constantly pushed extra aggressive, pro-agribusiness insurance policies,” meals coverage knowledgeable 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 help.” I noticed that actuality myself after I wrote final yr concerning the cozy relationship between the meat business and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s VP choose.
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 right this moment — to push again towards the sorts of horrific allegations made towards 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 particular person after accounting for poultry exports. Rooster could also be branded as a more healthy, extra sustainable different to beef and pork, however its mass manufacturing and consumption — whether or not from Mountaire or its opponents — depends on unimaginable human and animal struggling.
“We’re up towards a extremely huge system that appears actually entrenched proper now,” stated Durand, one of many activists, “and we’re simply attempting to do no matter we are able to to disrupt that.”
