Pure Prairie Poultry convicted in chicken starvation case

Pure Prairie Poultry, Inc., was convicted of 30 counts of mistreatment of animals after the company filed for bankruptcy and abandoned roughly 2 million chickens in farms in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota after not being able to provide feed to farms.

The company did not send a representative to the Buffalo County courthouse and was found guilty due to no contest on March 3. The court ruled the company needs to pay $13,575, which could be difficult as Pure Prairie Poultry has gone bankrupt.

According to the criminal complaint, in October 2022 a farmer in Mondovi entered into a “broiler production agreement” with Pure Prairie Poultry, based in Minnesota, which delivered 24,000 chickens to the farmer.

Those chickens were supposed to be picked up on Sept. 17, 2024, but no one from Pure Prairie Poultry came to the farm. Eventually the company said it would pick up the 24,000 chickens on Oct. 7, 2024, however the farmer was running out of feed for the chickens.

But the feed ran out on Sept. 28.

The farmer contacted Pure Prairie Poultry every day from Sept. 28 to Oct. 7, 2024, to get more feed and was told by the company to “turn the lights off in the barn so the hungry chickens would be less active.”

“When the farmer would enter the barn, the chickens would flock to them in search of food, and they were fearful to put their hands and fingers near the ground lest they might be pecked by thousands of starving chickens,” the complaint reads. “The farmer could not personally afford to purchase feed for the chickens, as PPP had failed to reimburse them $7,500 for electricity and liquefied propane as the terms of the Agreement required.”

Eventually the farmer gave away the chickens by Oct. 16, 2024, but not before hundreds died.

“In total, due to (Pure Prairie Poultry) failure to provide feed, the birds went 19 days without eating. Throughout that period, scores of chickens suffered and died, including many by starvation,” the complaint reads. “The farmer’s internal records state that from September 28, 2024, and October 5, 2024, between 24 and 50 chickens were found dead each day, with the daily mortality count increasing as more time went by without a feed delivery from PPP. The animals quite literally starved to death.”

Pure Prairie Poultry had been struggling financially throughout 2024 and even informed the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship in September 2024 that it was unable to purchase feed for 14 Iowa farms putting more than 1.4 million chickens at risk.

In October 2024, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Derrick Van Orden along other U.S. representatives and U.S. senators wrote a letter to then-secretary of U.S. Department of Agriculture Tom Vilsack questioning the millions of dollars in grants the company received from the U.S.