The corruption scandal at the United States Postal Service has resulted in delivery delays. Most prominently mentioned are prescription drugs mailed to 750,000 veterans enrolled in VA Health Care, and the 500,000 senior citizens who still get the Social Security in the mail (the vast majority of seniors now have direct deposit). But there is the matter of dead chicks. I haven’t seen anybody else write a diary about the politics of dead day-old chicks, so here goes.
The busy season in the newly-hatched chick business is spring, and I vividly recall the day ours arrived in the USPS mailbox on Tarbell Hill Road in rural Maine. Our two girls were part of that year’s 4H chicken project and we were all set up with a warming light, food and water sources, and a cage of fencing to keep the cat away from the cardboard box where the chicks would grow in the living room. We opened the package and all the chicks were alive, that day.
We got ours from McMurray Company in Webster City, Iowa, near the center of the state. We’d gotten the McMurray catalog in December and all four of us would take turns studying it while under an Afghan near the woodstove. It was fun to learn about possible breeds and allow the kids to discuss the merits of which one they liked. We settled on Rhode Island Reds but got a Bearded Polish Cock just for the heck of it. He grew up to be territorial, but that is a story for another time. You don’t need a rooster to get eggs.
They grew up to be free range chickens and we had plenty of eggs. My younger daughter lives on a (different) rundown farm in Central Maine and she has a new flock of her own there.
Iowa
You can grow your own chicks of course, but these days fewer people do that. Everyone it seems, orders from Iowa, and there are many industrial hatcheries in addition to McMurray. Each live chick that you order costs about $3.50 to $5.99 it seems. If you ordered a dozen and they all arrived dead, you would be out of up to $75.00. It’s not like you pay ten cents. I don’t expect that Louie DeJoy has any idea of the cost of live chicks.
Chicken Facts from Iowa Poultry Association
- Iowa ranks #1 in the nation for egg production
- #1 in egg processing
- Iowa's nearly 59 million laying hens produce almost 16 billion eggs per year
- Iowa’s chicken layers consume 55 million bushels of corn and 504,500 tons of soybean meal yearly
- Iowa “breaks” an estimated 42% of the eggs further processed in the United States.
- Iowa’s egg producers create more than 8,000 jobs annually. $2 billion in total sales, $502 million in personal wages and over $22 million in state tax revenues!
- Today’s hens use a little over half of the amount of feed to produce a dozen eggs compared to 1960, all while decreasing their environmental footprint by approximately 50%.
- Iowa is home to a growing broiler industry, with rapid growth over the past year due to easily accessible food sources for the broilers.
- Iowa’s egg and poultry farmers are committed to producing safe, high-quality, nutritious, and affordable food products for human consumption throughout the country.
I don’t know how much of a sub-industry the proportion of the day-old chick business may be. But this corrupt mishandling of mailed chicks would seem to cause a disruption in supply. These companies are lucky it didn’t happen during the busy spring season.
A handy report summarizing the economic benefit of the industry can be seen here. You may already know that Iowa is a major corn-producing state, but had you considered that the laying hens eat corn and the chicken business is a major consumer of Iowa corn?
I says in the report that Iowa chicks depend on inexpensive and timely shipping.
My conclusion when I learn all this is that Biden and Harris should visit one of these egg-producing plants to make the case that Trump’s vandalism of the USPS is specifically hurting Iowa farmers. I would think they would be in the column of convinceable rural voters that could vote the Democratic ticket if they don’t already.
