In May, Hickman’s Family Farms—a major US egg company—announced the loss of a staggering 95 percent of its chicken flock after highly pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu) swept through several of its farms in Arizona. To prevent further disease spread, approximately 6 million birds were reportedly killed, the majority of whom were being raised within massive industrial facilities—the largest of which, according to US Department of Agriculture data, housed over 2.25 million chickens at a site in Maricopa County. On operations of this size, flocks are typically “depopulated” using an extremely cruel method known as ventilation shutdown plus heat (VSD+), which slowly induces heatstroke.
The animal welfare and economic disasters that bird flu has unleashed on the US poultry and egg industries, which have lost nearly 175 million birds since the start of the outbreak in 2022—make a very strong case for placing restrictions on flock sizes within any one facility and requiring proper emergency planning.
Bird flu is not the only thing that has recently wrought devastation at Hickman’s Family Farms facilities—the company has also experienced three massive fires over the past six years. The first occurred in 2019 in a large empty structure just before it was stocked, followed by another fire in 2021 that reportedly killed over 165,000 hens, and another in 2024 that destroyed a multistory structure in which many hens were presumably killed, though the number of deaths was never released.