Olivera Farms, the Price of Eggs

Can you see me??

The image on your left is a farm located in Lathrop, CA. With the exception of that black “lake”, this is what 99% of all egg farms look like from above. The six sheds or white buildings house more than 700,000 hens, all of whom live in cages so small they cannot spread their wings. All of them are de-beaked.

The farm is owned by Olivera Farms and in 2008, I accompanied a lawyer from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to visit the small neighborhood next to that farm. Those small buildings on the right are homes, and they are only a few hundred feet from a 16.5 acre pool of chicken shit.

I feel comfortable talking about my experience now that Olivera Farms is facing six violations and a lawsuit filed on behalf of 10 residents living near the farm. No matter your feelings about HSUS, they are the only organization to follow through on their promise to help the marginalized community stuck near this farm. With a great amount of luck and good fortune, this may end well for both the neighbors and the birds…with the dismantlement of the farm.

Olivera Farms is what I consider a normal egg farm. I’ve been to two of their farms, the one pictured and a smaller 160,000 hen operation in Gilroy, CA. Their Gilroy farm was going out of business, and I was part of an animal coalition legally rescuing 2,000 hens (see Sarah’s diary). The farm, by egg industry standards, was antiquated. Instead of 5-7 tiers of cages, it only had three. It did not have “drop pans”, so the feces from birds above covered birds below. It had not, to my knowledge, been cleaned in its existence. The cobwebs coating the ceiling and completely obscuring the fire extinguisher highlighted that fact. The fans on the farm were in disrepair, meaning fresh air was never circulated throughout the sheds. This is common for Olivera Farms – at another farm, the fans were left in disrepair and, during a particularly hot summer in the California’s central valley, 160,000 hens suffocated and died.

Their now defunct Los Banos farm received complaints dating back to the 1980s (the farm closed in 2005). Flies, odor and raw sewage were the primary concerns along with concern their drinking water was being tainted by chicken manure.

In 2007, a group of animal activists, myself included, and concerned residents fought to stop Olivera Farms from building a 900,000 cage operation in Stockton, CA. The site was on a flood plain and less than 1/2 a mile from a proposed housing development. In an amazing move, the environmental inspection summed it up – No dec. No declaration. Nothing environmentally disconcerting about placing a large farm in the middle of a flood plain or near homes.  It was only because of Proposition 2 that Olivera Farms ceased the permit process and regrouped. By the time he had built the 900,000 hen farm, it would have violated state law which by 2015 requires hens, male calves and pregnant sows have enough room to turn around and stretch their limbs without touching the sides of their enclosure.

In 2008, Olivera Farms started the permit process of a 450,000 hen egg farm in Lathrop (it’s on hold pending further environmental review).

They have an accepted 250-300 hen/per day mortality rate- this is normal.  Olivera Farms has not been forthcoming on how they slaughter the “spent hens” – there is no slaughterhouse in California accepting “spent hens”, and the birds are exempt from the state’s slaughter law. That means they can be killed in any manner the producer sees fit.

I’m not really picking on Olivera Farms, I’m just more familiar with them than any other egg farm. They are the norm, not the outlier.

Their farm in Lathrop has also received complaints prior to this lawsuit and investigation. In 2007, a complaint was filed with the county regarding the odor from the manure pit, the smell of incinerating chickens and the fly count. Nothing was done. For years, the residents next to the farm have found themselves left to fend for themselves without any intervention from the county or state government. No one has cared. Not for the people and certainly not for the chickens. Farming takes precedence over good health, safe drinking water, and animal welfare (which I think is impossible on farms).

We visited the farm on a hot June day. I should clarify: We didn’t visit the farm. There was never a moment when I could peer into shadowed buildings and see those suffering hens. We spent our time on the other side of the lagoon, talking with the people who lived and breathed the farm’s foul air (which was perhaps a 100 times worse for the birds).

Surrounding the farm is acres and acres of crop land, vegetables we purchase in supermarkets. It’s perhaps something many vegans don’t think about, but it’s very real – all those vegetables are sprayed with the liquid manure from suffering hens. The drainage ditches we saw were black and sluggish, the side effect of both too much artificial and “natural” (chicken shit) fertilizer. Bacteria, like Salmonella, are not normally found on produce, but when they are, it’s generally because of chicken manure used to fertilize the crops. A pipe from the farm’s 16.5 acre lagoon could be traced all the way to a river, potential drinking water for humans. It’s, of course, illegal for Olivera Farms to dump any manure into that river, but it is highly suspect that they would have a pipe leading directly to a waterway.

Let me paint the scene, as best I can. You drive up to what looks like a shimmering pond. It’s almost pretty, if not for the large white buildings looming in the distance. Your AC is on, so you don’t really know what the outside environs are like. When you turn the car off, it is apparent there is something off with the air outside. Open the door and you will want to climb right back inside and drive away. The smell! I’d say it’s like a backed up outhouse, but it’s about a 1,000 times worse. It’s shit sitting in the hot valley sun, thousands upon thousands of gallons. The flies overwhelm you in seconds. You are pretty certain your clothes will have to be discarded, and you may very well have to endure a bleach bath to rid yourself of the stench. When the wind blows, you can smell the farm a mile away.You are thankful you don’t live there.

The people who live closest to the farm have to truck water in or buy it at the supermarket – they do not dare drink the ground water, drinking water adjacent to an untreated cesspool. The flies are omnipresent. Some of the residents have to work outside, tending to their small crop of produce that is their livelihood. They complain of asthma and ocular irritation. There are no festive parties or evenings lounging on the patio. Families do not visit loved ones. And they cannot leave. Once a large farm, especially one so close with an open manure pit, builds next to your home, the value of your property diminishes rapidly. People who once thought they were getting land and isolation from more urban areas are now stuck with unsellable, nearly uninhabitable property.

The price of eggs goes beyond the cost of a dozen at the grocery store.

Animal costs – 99% of egg farms look like Olivera’s from the sky – no one would recognize it as an animal farm. Birds are warehoused. They are denied natural behaviors. They are starved to induce a new laying cycle. They are mutilated and their brothers all killed. Federal law exempts them from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which requires “livestock” be stunned insensible to pain before their throats are cut – poultry are exempt. In California, no slaughterhouse accepts “spent hens” and you can legally kill them anyway you want (including running them through a woodchipper).

Environmental costs – No matter how you look at it, this is an unsustainable way to farm. That manure will leech into the ground and thus into the drinking water of humans. The products of that lagoon will be used to spray our crops and, in some cases, to excess, leading to an increase in nitrogen in the water and the depletion of oxygen. Excess nitrogen from animal farms and artificial fertilizer kills millions of fish every year and disrupts the balance of every ecosystem through which the waterways run.

Human costs – Of course there are the negative health effects of consuming meat, dairy and eggs the way we Americans do. Heart disease and cancer and obesity are but a few. But there are the hidden costs of what farms do to rural America and to the human beings unlucky enough to live near them. Asthma is an enormous problem. Flies and the diseases they can carry are troublesome too. Other forms of lung and eye irritation afflict people who live near farms. They are more likely to carry the bacteria resistant to modern and life-saving antibiotics, because they are more likely to be exposed to the flies, air and infected groundwater carrying that bacteria. The bacteria is, of course, resistant for a variety of reasons, but feeding antibiotic-laced feed to hens on egg farms doesn’t help.

I ached for those people that hot, June day. I ached for the hens who I never saw. And I hope, against all hope, that this litigation becomes so cumbersome, so expensive, so troublesome that Olivera Farms just shuts down that farm and leaves, never to come back. It’s a small hope, I know. The lawsuit is a reminder that we can approach the end of animal agriculture in many ways. We have to. There are billions of animals who need us.