Poultry farmers in northern Arkansas left to deal with thousands of dead birds after a contractor apparently closes its doors

GREEN FORREST, Ark. (KY3) -Some poultry farmers across Arkansas may be losing money. Cooks Venture has contracts with farmers to grow their birds, but now those farmers say they’ve been told Cooks is closing its doors. They say the company wants to euthanize all the birds.

Recently, farmers say the contractor, without warning, said it is coming in to kill tens of thousands of chickens, leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds of birds behind for the farmers.

“I did not consent for them to kill their birds on my property and leave them for me to dispose of,” said farmer Dustin Maybee.

Maybee comes from a family of farmers. His father was a grower. He was, too, until recently.

“Two days ago, I got told that they’d be foamed, which is the process of suffocating them in houses,” said Maybee. “And they’re telling me that they, they’re going to have to, or I’m going to have to get rid of their dead birds after they kill them.”

Maybee’s farm has five houses holding tens of thousands of chickens each. And it’s not just a problem for Maybee’s farm.

Like Bill Melbourne, other farmers in the area will also lose out on thousands of their birds. He says while he doesn’t like the idea of the chickens getting killed, his main concern is dealing with the hundreds of thousands of pounds of dead birds that will be left behind.

“Instead of killing them in these farms, let’s see what we can do about processing them,” said Melbourne. “There are people out there that have needs, you know. Process them and donate them to shelter places like that. So yeah, it is devastating.”

Another issue for farmers is the potential environmental impacts thousands of decaying birds can cause, including groundwater contamination. State Senator Bryan King, a poultry farmer himself, says his issue is that this could have been avoided.

“The (U.S.) Secretary of Agriculture was notified about this, and they never called me,” said Senator King. “They made the decision to go out there and depopulate the chickens, and, you know, there’s a lot of other solutions that should have been exhausted first before we got to this point. But unfortunately for the farmers, you know, that I was never contacted, and unfortunately, they failed.”

KY3 has contacted multiple Cooks representatives for comment but none have responded. We will post it here when and if we do.

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