PORTLAND, Maine — At least 4,800 chicks shipped to Maine farmers through the U.S. Postal Service have arrived dead in the recent weeks since rapid cuts hit the federal mail carrier's operations, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree said.
Pingree, a Maine Democrat, is raising the issue of the dead chicks and the losses farms are facing in a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and U.S. Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sonny Perdue, The Portland Press Herald reported Wednesday.
Pauline Henderson, who owns Pine Tree Poultry in New Sharon, Maine, told the newspaper she was shocked last week when all of the 800 chicks sent to her from a hatchery in Pennsylvania were dead.
“Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.”
For those who may not have known about the practice, baby chicks are routinely sent through the US Mail because they can go up to 48-72 hours without needing to eat or drink after hatching. They are still living off the yolk from the egg.
Trump’s war on the Post Office and his campaign against voting by mail are causing huge collateral damage to everyone who depends on timely, dependable mail delivery. It’s not just the cruelty and the waste — it’s the casual obliviousness of Trump and his toadies to the havoc they are wreaking in so many ways. People are not getting medications; people are waiting for checks, trying to protect their credit by paying their bills on time. All of that is in jeopardy — and now we find out it’s threatening our food supply and inflicting needless animal cruelty.
That’s so Republican.
More:
What was once a reliable and safe method of transporting chicks has apparently been undermined by widespread overhauls of operations at the U.S. Postal Service, including cutbacks in sorting equipment, ending extra trips by carriers and an edict to end all overtime by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Some Democrats accuse DeJoy of intentionally raising concerns about the timely delivery of absentee ballots in the November election, sowing concern and confusion among voters as President Trump repeatedly asserts – without evidence – that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud.
No word if Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is ‘concerned’, but Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat, is not happy.
“It’s one more of the consequences of this disorganization, this sort of chaos they’ve created at the post office and nobody thought through when they were thinking of slowing down the mail,” Pingree said, adding that her office has received dozens of complaints from farmers and others trying to raise a small flock of chickens in the backyard.
“And can you imagine, you have young kids and they are getting all excited about having a backyard flock and you go to the post office and that’s what you find?”
Pingree wonders if Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue is even aware of the problem. (He’s no relation to Perdue Farms, although it would be entirely believable Trump picked him because of his name.)
For those who aren’t familiar with chickens and egg production, chickens are only productive as egg layers for the first 2-3 years of what is around an 8 year life span. This means there is a regular turn-over of commercial flocks to get rid of birds that are no longer laying by a number of means. Egg laying breeds are not generally suitable for meat after their egg-laying years are done, which is why this is the practice for commercial operations.
So, there are suppliers who specialize in supplying chicks to large operations as well as people with smaller flocks or even individual backyards where they are as much pets as egg producers. It’s not just about factory farms — many of those have their own operations to keep a steady supply of chicks into the pipeline.
Shipping by mail goes back to 1918, and it has long been an integral part of poultry farming.
Many small farms whose eggs and chickens you might find at a local farmers’ market get their chicks from mail-order hatcheries. Without them, farmers’ markets wouldn’t have poultry, says Metzer: “There would not be smaller producers able to efficiently do that.” Industrial operations like Tyson or Foster Farms have their own hatcheries and delivery systems, as well as their own breeders. Metzer says that without the post office, there would be more of that kind of vertical integration and fewer businesses willing to experiment with providing rare breeds. “For those people who don’t like industrial farming, well then they should encourage the post office,” he says.
It has some important advantages which apply to all breeds, not just egg layers.
“Historically, one of the biggest threats to endangered breeds is regional isolation,” says Ryan Walker, marketing and communications manager at the Livestock Conservancy, an organization dedicated to preserving and protecting rare breeds of farm animals from extinction. If a breed only lives in a small area and there’s a natural disaster, it can wipe out “a significant portion of the population,” Walker says. He adds that the ease of shipping poultry “has allowed these genetics to be spread around the country, or even the world, in some cases.”
In recent years, people with the room, the zoning, and the inclination have taken up back yard chicken keeping for fresh eggs and to get away from factory farming. The two chickens in the photo up top are from our own flock, Oreo and Ginger. We got into having our own chickens via rentthechicken.com several years ago. They supply the coop, the food, and the birds to get started. You have the option of renting them for the most productive part of the year and having them picked up at the end of the season, or you can decide to keep them full time if it works out for you. We decided to keep ours.
We started with two birds; we now have 3 adults birds and 3 young recruits. We have enough room to let the flock roam during the day. (Tip — fence off any garden areas you don’t want them digging up or crops you don’t want them sampling.) One of them was lost to a hawk, the other passed away from natural causes. We’ve since gotten replacements from local chicken raisers, and more recently from our neighbor who has her own flock, complete with a rooster. We usually get two eggs a day. Besides chicken feed and what they find foraging, they’ll also go for kitchen scraps. They’re like mini velociraptors with feathers.
