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 works

The 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.”

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