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Ohio: Are You OK With Cramming Six Million More Hens Into Battery Cages?
December 19, 2008

Residents in Union County are fighting the construction of what would be Ohio’s largest egg farm – a  battery cage facility that would confine six million hens on a single parcel of land, and they need your help!

Iowa-based Hi-Q Egg Products LLC has filed an application with the Ohio Department of Agriculture to build and operate a 6-million-chicken egg factory that would produce 70,000 tons of chicken manure annually in York Township in northwestern Union County. Sources say that if the project is approved it could, when combined with existing facilities in that area, lead to the confinement of 11 million chickens — nearly the entire human population of Ohio — within a three-mile radius.

As the country’s second-largest egg producing state, Ohio is already home to more than 26 million laying hens. Nearly all of these hens are confined in battery cages that prevent them from standing upright, spreading their wings, or even taking more than a few steps for their entire lives. At Farm Sanctuary, we’ve seen firsthand the cruelly debilitating effects of battery cages on the hens forced to live in them, and nursed back to health numerous lucky girls like Angie, Nadia and Yonkers.

Public sentiment is increasingly on the side of the hens: several countries have banned battery cages and the entire European Union has agreed to phase them out by 2012. In addition, Californians recently passed Proposition 2 by an overwhelming margin, which will end the use of battery cages in the state by 2015.

Factory egg farms have been a blight on Ohio’s communities for years. In 2002, Ohio’s infamous Buckeye Egg Farm — previously the state’s largest factory egg producer — paid local residents $19.7 million to settle a lawsuit for the flies, odors and polluted waterways that destroyed their quality of life. Not long after, state officials ordered the facility shut down for good. Following Buckeye’s demise, several investigations into Ohio’s largest egg production facilities revealed horrendous animal cruelty that captured statewide media attention. 

Residents throughout Union County and beyond have registered their adamant opposition to the construction of Hi-Q’s facility. The Union County Commission, the Marysville City Council, the Union County Board of Health, and the Franklin County Commission, among others, have passed formal resolutions opposing the facility.

Said Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy, "Putting the largest chicken facility in our watershed is something that we need to express our concern about. A million people depend on this watershed; a million people in Franklin County; and we saw with Buckeye Egg farm — and this is bigger than Buckeye Egg — what problems can arise from a facility like that."