Who’s Murdering Thousands of Chickens in South Carolina?

Somebody turned the fans off on 300,000 chickens to suffocate them—somebody who knows exactly how the industry worksThe chicken farm on Brewer Road, just south of the small  town of Manning in South Carolina, is hidden away down a series of winding country highways, between a patch of forest and an empty farm field. On the morning of Feb. 17 the farm’s owner, a Vietnamese immigrant named Hoangson Nguyen, was awakened by a frantic phone call. Nguyen, who goes by “Sonny,” raises birds under contract for Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s second-largest poultry company. An employee who checks the chicken houses each morning was shouting over the phone. Something was terribly wrong. 
Nguyen sped to the farm. That morning, when the farmhand opened the door to the first building, a sophisticated warehouse designed to hold about 20,000 birds, a column of steam had billowed out. Nguyen went into the control room and saw that the temperature inside was 122F. He entered the cavernous building. It was like a sauna: The giant circular fans used to cool the chicken house had been switched off. A set of electronic alarms had also been disabled. There were thousands of dead chickens on the ground, pressed up against the walls as if they’d tried to escape. They’d been smothered to death overnight in the intense heat. Nguyen knew immediately that this wasn’t an accident. Someone had killed his flock.
Nguyen is a typical chicken farmer: He owes the bank about $2 million for his farm, and he doesn’t have enough money for health insurance. He lives paycheck-to-paycheck, or “flock-to-flock,” as they say in the business. The moment he saw the dead birds, Nguyen knew he wouldn’t make any money this year. Whoever had killed these birds might very well have killed his farm. “I fell down right in front of the door,” he says. “I almost passed out.”
Nguyen’s farm wasn’t the only one hit that night. Three others also had their control systems sabotaged, killing the birds inside. Over the next week about 320,000 chickens died in attacks on farms throughout Clarendon County, in what appears to be the largest crime against industrial poultry farms in U.S. history. All the birds were owned by Pilgrim’s, which pays Nguyen and other farmers to raise the animals.
The dead birds were worth about $1.7 million to Pilgrim’s, but it was the farmers who suffered the most financially from the attacks. Each lost about $10,000 for every house of chickens killed. For people living flock-to-flock, it was a potentially ruinous blow, and one that can be understood only within the peculiar and brutal economics of chicken farming. Companies such as Pilgrim’s force contract farmers to compete against one another for their pay. One farmer’s bonus is taken directly from his neighbor’s paycheck. 

Temperature systems that had been tampered with proved fatal.

To police, this detail suggested a possible motive. Based on the highly precise manner in which the farms had been targeted and their poultry slaughtered, investigators quickly concluded that whoever was behind the attacks was intimately familiar with chicken farming. Within days of the midnight massacre, it became clear Nguyen and the others had been victimized by one of their own—a fellow farmer who’d come to see his neighbors, and their flocks, as the enemy.

Chicken houses targeted in the February attacks typically held 20,000 to 30,000 birds.

Sheriff Randy Garrett is the top lawman in Clarendon County. Garrett is more than 6 feet tall, with wide shoulders and piercing blue eyes. He uses a cane—he’s recovering from a recent car accident—but even with a pronounced limp he fills the room with his imposing presence when he walks in. In June he’s celebrating his 41st year on the force.

On Feb. 17, as Garrett’s deputies fielded calls from farmers who woke up to find their flocks had been killed, they learned that the attacker used different methods of slaughter. Full-grown birds like those on Nguyen’s farm were cooked to death. In farms that had baby chicks, which need high temperatures to simulate a brooding nest, the saboteur cut the heat. The chicks froze to death, piling up in a futile effort to stay warm and smothering those at the bottom of the heap. 

Then there were the alarms. Chicken houses are equipped with a variety of systems to alert farmers when machinery malfunctions; things can go wrong quickly when a house is crowded with 20,000 or 30,000 birds. Whoever disabled the alarms understood the farmers’ different systems, so no one was notified. 

Pilgrim’s Pride is owned by the Brazilian meatpacking conglomerate JBS, one of the largest meat companies in the world. Pilgrim’s, which reported $8.6 billion in revenue last year, does business with more than 4,000 contract farmers in the U.S. and Mexico. The farmers in Clarendon County all raise birds for a Pilgrim’s processing plant in Sumter, S.C. “We knew from the start that it had to be somebody that was disgruntled, mad, upset with Pilgrim’s,” Garrett says. “This is not somebody just riding by [who] just randomly said: ‘You know, I’m going to create havoc a little bit and go kill me some birds.’ … You had to have inside knowledge.”

Garrett got a crash course on the confusing structure of modern poultry farming. Here’s how it works: A farmer such as Nguyen borrows money to build a farm. Then he signs a contract with a company like Pilgrim’s, which is called an “integrator” because it owns virtually every aspect of production, including hatcheries, feed mills, slaughterhouses, and trucking lines—everything but the chicken houses and the land they stand on. The integrators deliver the chickens, bring the feed, and even provide medicine for the birds if needed. The farmer’s job is to baby-sit the animals and make sure the heating and feeding systems are working. After about six weeks or so, the integrator picks the birds up for slaughter, sending the farmer a paycheck for his work.

In the eyes of the law, Pilgrim’s Pride was the primary victim of the chicken house attacks because it owned the birds. But Pilgrim’s wasn’t like any crime victim Garrett had dealt with before. He quickly found himself tangling with a corporate bureaucracy that stretched from South Carolina to Greeley, Colo., the U.S. headquarters for JBS. On Feb. 17, Garrett arranged a meeting with Darren Bolton, who oversees farming operations at the Pilgrim’s Sumter plant. They sat down in a conference room at the sheriff’s office, where Garrett laid out his theory of the case: Pilgrim’s was likely attacked by an angry employee. He asked Bolton if Pilgrim’s had recently fired anyone or performed layoffs. Could he think of anyone who might have a grudge? Garrett says Bolton told him he couldn’t think of anyone.

The chicken industry’s system for compensating farmers, however, is explicitly designed to punish those who under-perform their peers—a recipe for resentment and grievance. Other farmers get paid a certain price per pound or bushel for the commodity they raise; chicken farmers are paid in a system known as a tournament.