Why 597 million chickens go missing from America’s food supply each year

America’s favorite animal to eat — the chicken — has also become its most expendable: In 2021, around 556 million chickens in the US died at hatcheries and on farms before reaching the slaughterhouse, their carcasses winding up in landfills, incinerators, compost heaps, or pet food.

An additional 41 million never entered the food supply, either because they died during transport to the slaughterhouse or were slaughtered but deemed unsafe to eat due to a variety of reasons, including tumors, bruising, or infections.

That’s all according to a new analysis released today by the international animal rights group Animal Equality.

To put Animal Equality’s findings into perspective, these 597 million chickens that are never consumed — 6 percent of the 9.8 billion raised for meat every year in the US — are far greater than the combined number of turkeys, pigs, and cattle slaughtered for meat annually.

So many chickens die prematurely on farms that one startup even created a robot to scoop them up so farmworkers don’t have to — it’s built into the industry’s business model.

In 2021, the National Chicken Council, the industry’s main trade group, reported a 5.3 percent mortality rate, or the share of birds that die prematurely, but that analysis only included chickens that died on farms. Animal Equality’s report provides a more comprehensive accounting, including for other deaths in the production chain, such as chickens that die after birth at the hatcheries where they’re incubated and born, in transport to farms, and those that are slaughtered but don’t enter the food supply.

“The industry knows that a significant portion — [nearly] 600 million animals — are going to die, and that still allows them to make a profit,” said Sean Thomas, Animal Equality’s international director of investigations. Across the group’s undercover investigations of factory farms, Thomas said, “we don’t see veterinary care for a single chicken that is sick, because that single chicken does not matter to the industry.”

All these dead chickens constitute a form of hidden food waste that adds up to an unfathomable amount of suffering, as the birds perish from what have become features of American poultry farming: painful diseases, heart attacks, dehydration, starvation, and rough handling.

Additionally, around one-fifth of poultry meat that does enter the US food supply is thrown away by grocers, restaurants, and consumers at home. When accounting for both waste in the production chain and waste at the consumer and retail levels, about one-quarter of chickens hatched — some 2.6 billion per year — are never consumed.

The problem appears to only be getting worse. Since the mid-20th century, the poultry industry has steadily reduced its on-farm mortality rate. But in the last decade, it’s been on the rise, recently reaching levels not seen since the 1960s.

It’s well understood what kills chickens on farms: infectious diseases and health problems that stem from how the birds are bred to grow too big and too fast. Over the last decade, producers have been breeding chickens to grow ever bigger, which could explain why more and more are dying on farms. Another likely cause of increasing mortality could be that chicken farms, under pressure from public health officials and advocates, have used fewer antibiotic drugs in recent years, because the poultry industry’s use of these lifesaving drugs is a major driver of the antibiotics resistance crisis.

Both of these problems can be addressed in a way that alleviates the animals’ suffering and safeguards antibiotics used in human medicine. One of the country’s largest chicken companies is showing how it can be done, but the question is whether the rest of the industry will follow.

What’s causing the spike in dead chickens on farms?

Around 1950, US farmers began feeding their chickens and other farmed animals antibiotics to make them grow faster and prevent disease. Rather than reserve them for cases when an animal gets sick, the drugs have been widely used prophylactically as a crutch to keep farmed animals alive in the unsanitary, overcrowded warehouses in which the vast majority of them are raised, and where disease proliferates.

By the early 2000s, about half of all antibiotics ever produced globally had been fed to livestock.

Over time, public health experts learned this practice had come back to bite us: Bacteria commonly found on farms, like Salmonella and E. coli, were mutating and becoming resistant to antibiotics, making the drugs less effective in treating humans.

Throughout the 20th century, numerous efforts aimed at the US Food and Drug Administration to restrict antibiotic use in food production failed in the face of pharmaceutical lobbying pressure and growing anti-regulatory sentiment. But after decades of pressure, US fast food restaurants and big chicken companies eventually took action, as did the FDA.

In 2014, just 3 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics; by 2018, more than half were, and 90 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics relevant in human medicine. It was a major public health win, but as the livestock industry was quick to point out, it led to more chickens dying on farms.

As a result, Tyson Foods — the nation’s largest poultry producer — and Chick-fil-A each rolled back their “no antibiotics ever” pledges and reintroduced a class of antibiotics called ionophores, which aren’t used in human medicine. Ionophores pose a lesser threat to human health, though some experts worry they could still contribute to the growth of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

But the data suggests the chicken industry’s move away from antibiotics isn’t the only cause of its rising mortality rate: Even as antibiotic use remained stable from 2018 to 2023, on-farm mortality rates continued to climb. Some of that could be attributed to disease outbreaks that impacted the industry during this period, like infectious bronchitis, Avian metapneumovirus, and necrotic enteritis. But part of the problem could be what the meat industry has done to the chickens themselves.

Chickens are getting too big to survive

In the 1950s, poultry companies began breeding chickens to grow bigger and faster. Back then, it would take chickens 70 days to reach their “market weight” of 3 pounds. Now, chickens reach 6.5 pounds in just 47 days; almost half the time for more than double the weight.

Among other traits, poultry companies selectively bred chickens to have bigger breasts, the most valuable part of the bird. As a result, today’s chickens are extremely top-heavy compared to chickens of the past.

Animal advocates say this transformation has turned the birds into “Frankenchickens” that are “prisoners in their own bodies,” which cause a number of health problems that lead to premature death. Many chickens’ tiny legs can’t support the weight of their giant breasts, leading to injuries that can be so severe that they struggle to walk to reach food and water, resulting in death by dehydration or starvation.

Between 2013 and 2023, when antibiotics use fell, chickens were bred to grow 10.5 percent bigger, which could’ve contributed to rising mortality rates. Fast-growing chickens “have relatively high mortality rates as compared to slower growing strains (and systems with higher welfare requirements),” Ingrid de Jong, a senior researcher of poultry welfare at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told me over email.

It’s unclear how much of a role this played in rising mortality over the last decade, however, because for many decades before, poultry companies had been making chickens grow bigger while reducing mortality rates. It could be that in recent years, these companies have hit a biological limit of sorts — a point at which making the birds grow bigger and bigger has made more of them die on the farm.

Animal advocates want to see the poultry industry switch to slower-growing chicken breeds, which they argue would do more to reduce animal suffering than just about any other single change to the factory farm system.

Chicken companies don’t need to decide between more dead birds and protecting antibiotics

Big chicken producers might now be thinking that they need to choose between phasing out antibiotics to protect human health and keeping chicken mortality rates down. But the experience of Perdue Farms, America’s fifth largest chicken producer, shows that would be a mistake.

The company isn’t exactly a shining beacon of animal welfare — in most ways, its operations look much like any other factory farm — but it’s taken steps to alleviate animal suffering that other major producers haven’t, and remains committed to never using antibiotics even as its competitors have resumed using them.

Perdue began to remove antibiotics from its production in 2002 and became antibiotic-free by 2016. Early in the process, its mortality rate was slightly above the industry average, but now the company’s mortality rate tends to run “about half a percent to a percent better” than the industry, Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue Farms’ chief science officer, told me.

The company got there in part by cleaning up its breeding operations and hatcheries: “We’re not relying on this kind of antibiotic to clean up something that we could do ourselves.” For instance, it works to get its breeding hens to lay their eggs in nests, rather than on the floor where there might be disease.

The company also refined its vaccine regimen, and adjusted its chicken feed by adding probiotics and removing animal byproducts, which can irritate the birds’ guts, among other changes.

Across the chicken industry, a lot of birds die in their final week of life — which is under seven weeks — as the health problems that stem from fast growth catch up with them. To help mitigate this problem, Perdue sends its birds to the slaughterhouse when they’re at a slightly lower weight than the industry average. “The last week gets harder when you have heavier birds,” Stewart-Brown said.

The company is also conducting experiments with numerous slower-growing breeds. It’s not going as far or fast as animal advocates want to see the company go, but it’s more than what Perdue’s competitors have done.

Many chicks also die in the beginning of their lives at hatcheries, where they can be roughly handled, culled due to injuries or deformities, or injured on the mechanical processing line. Many also die in transport from the hatchery to the farm, in which their fragile bodies are packed tightly into crates and don’t receive food or water for 24 to 72 hours.

There’s a growing push in Europe for on-farm hatching, which has shown to reduce mortality and the need for early-stage antibiotics.

Poultry production is the least regulated part of the meat industry, which isn’t saying much, considering beef and pork production have also been thoroughly deregulated. But chickens have no federal laws protecting them at the hatchery, the farm, or the slaughterhouse. Setting meaningful regulations for animal welfare, farm hygiene, and antibiotics would go a long way toward reducing animal suffering and mortality on poultry farms.

Absent that, the industry is left to engage in a never-ending game of optimization whack-a-mole, in which public health and animal welfare are almost always sacrificed on the altar of endless chicken wings and cheap meat.