Iowa Egg Recall: One Link in a Thirty-Year Chain of DeCoster Abuses

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With extensive media coverage of the nationwide salmonella outbreak, it’s no secret that Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the agribusiness tycoon linked to the recent outbreak, has a decades-long, sleazy history of harming workers, animals and the environment. In an August 23 article, journalist Martha Rosenberg chronicles in shocking detail some of DeCoster’s worst abuses.

Rosenberg reports that Maine Contract Farming – formerly the DeCoster Egg Farm – has been charged by the Labor Department with employing five 11-year-olds and a 9-year-old, and with “indenturing migrant workers, denying them contact with teachers, social workers, doctors, lawyers and labor organizers.” The Iowa Attorney General has labeled DeCoster a “habitual violator” of state environmental laws.

Last year, as the result of an MFA undercover cruelty investigation that revealed hens suffocating in trash cans, hens kicked into manure pits to drown in liquid feces and workers whipping hens around by their heads in attempts to break their necks, state officials raided DeCoster’s Quality Egg of New England farm in Turner. State investigators removed dozens of hens – live and dead – from the Turner facility and documented conditions that state veterinarian, Don Hoenig, described as “deplorable, horrifying and upsetting.”

Four Department of Agriculture workers had to be medically treated for burned lungs, after only brief exposure to DeCoster’s ammonia-laden barns. Earlier this year, in a landmark civil settlement with the state of Maine, DeCoster pleaded guilty to 10 counts of cruelty to animals and paid over $130,000 in fines and restitution.

Rosenberg also details the egg-industry-wide practice of killing of 200 million unwanted male chicks per year – often by grinding them up alive – citing MFA’s 2009 Hy-Line International hatchery investigation.

Click here to read the full article.