Leslie Harp is the owner of Empty Pockets Ranch in Clifty. At 5:30 in the morning on Nov. 17, Harp finished filling one of her chicken houses with chickens owned by a company called Cooks Venture.
Cooks is an Arkansas-based company specializing in heirloom fowl. Harp has been a contract grower for the company for the past three years. She was expecting more shipments of birds to fill the rest of the houses on her ranch within the following weeks.
Two hours later, at 7:30 am, she learned that Cooks Venture would be shutting down permanently, leaving Harp with 72,000 chickens and no clear indication of what was next.
In less than two weeks, those chickens would be dead. Foamed to death by the Department of Agriculture and left to rot. Here's Harp:
"We have not had any conversations since they left with Cooks or the state on what they were going to do to come clean them up. So those birds sat there in our houses for 11 days before my husband and I were like, 'Yeah, we've got to do something with this.' They're not coming back out because Cooks wouldn't answer my phone calls at that point in time. I tried to call them, we tried to contact them, they wouldn't answer the phone call. So we were finally like, 'Okay, we've had to do this ourselves. They're not coming back out.' So the birds sat there 11 days untouched. And they were rotting at that point in time. And the smell was just, it was horrendous. So we started cleaning that mess up ourselves and the state hasn't been back out nor has Cooks. And nobody's said anything about compensating us for what we did or why they never showed up."
But let's back up.
When Harp first learned of Cooks Closure, the company assured her they could continue raising the chickens until they were 4 pounds. The chickens would then be processed for food.
Harp says she wished that had happened. She had plenty of water, food, and heat for the birds and was prepared to raise them. However, plans kept changing over the following weeks.
Finally, on Tuesday, Nov. 28, she received a call from her live production manager, who said the state would come the next day to depopulate the chickens.
"And I was like, 'Wait a minute, that was not the plan yesterday.' I was like, 'What plan changed?' And he said that some things have happened within the company. We're just depopulating all the chickens. And I was like 'Well, can I keep the birds?' I was like, 'I have plenty of feed,plenty of water, plenty of heat. You know, I have a generator it runs, you know, I'm set up to run for the wintertime.' I was like, 'We're good to go.' I was like, 'Can we kind of keep the birds?' and they told me no. We didn't feel like we had an option, because within that letter, they stated the company would be closing down between Nov. 20 and Nov.30. So on November 29, which was the day that they were coming out to depopulate, the company was still technically in business at that point in time. So we didn't feel like we had an option to really, I guess, stand up and say, 'No, you're not coming out here,' because we were still under contract with this company. And these were technically still their birds at that point in time. So we allowed the state to come out the on the 29th of November, and the state of Arkansas came out and foamed our chickens and smothered them and killed all. I had 72,000 birds from our chicken houses at that point in time. And they killed off 72,000 of them."
Harp says that although they occasionally received sick chickens, Cook's closing was unexpected and, more importantly, uncommunicated until the last second.
She says the rug was pulled out from under her, leaving her responsible for picking up the pieces.
Harp isn't alone, either. Cooks had contracts with dozens of chicken farms across Northern Arkansas. In the end, the Department of Agriculture depopulated 1.3 million chickens in farms across the region.
I contacted the Department to learn more from Secretary Wes Ward or Livestock and Poultry Division Director Patrick Fisk. I was declined an interview, but the director of communications, Amy Lyman, sent me some telling documents over email.
According to one document titled "Cooks Venture Responses," the depopulation was in response to an outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI. It's a viral disease affecting poultry and wild birds. HPAI is often fatal to chickens and spreads rapidly from flock to flock.
According to the Department, the only available control is depopulation.
Last year, there was an HPAI outbreak that affected over 1,000 flocks in 47 states, requiring the depopulation of more than 79 million birds across the country. Arkansas had four flocks of infected chickens. The Department of Agriculture established an HPAI control zone at least 6.21 miles beyond the perimeter of the closest site of infection. That control zone included nine farms associated with Cooks Venture, although Cooks requested that the state euthanize all chickens owned by the company.
Harp says her birds, and the majority of birds owned by Cooks Venture, were perfectly healthy. She would have rather raised the chickens on her farm and then donated the meat to people in need.
"Well, yeah. That's wasted money and wasted meat. I mean, that's those chickens when they're 63 days older, like six and a half pounds. And you take, I think that on one farm that they killed, he had 70,000 birds on his farm that were six and a half pounds. That's a lot of poundage there that could have been processed somewhere to donate the meat somewhere for these families in Arkansas that can't afford to buy, you know, food or low-income families or homeless shelters are something that they could have donated that meat to instead of just sitting there. Now those chickens are dead and rotting and having to be buried somewhere instead of being processed to be able to feed other people in the state of Arkansas."
Regardless of why it happened, the chickens are dead.
In a letter dated Dec. 7, Cooks Venture COO Tim Singleton assured one farmer that "removal of the birds, the transportation of the birds and the disposal method of the birds will be done under a state of Arkansas approved permit, as the state has approved our plan of euthanasia, transportation and disposal."
But, as we previously heard from Harp, that promised removal never occurred. She says, despite hardship, she was a relatively lucky farmer in this ordeal.
"There are farmers that their birds were 63 days old. They were big, big chickens when the state came in to depopulate them. So, I mean, they were huge chickens. And this, they just come in and kill them. Because Cooks said they couldn't take care of them no more. So I didn't have- I mean, yes, we had a lot to deal with as far as the little babies that had come in. And we spent a lot of money keeping those birds warm for those 13 days. But for these other farmers out here who had 60-day-old birds, that's devastating to them. I mean, you know, you can't- they have to go bury their chickens. So they're having to dig holes on their farm now and scoop those out by bucketfuls, take them out, and go bury them somewhere on their farm because they had big chickens. And the cooks wouldn't come to get them, and they haven't been processed anywhere. They just had the state come in and kill them."
State Senator Bryan King has been a poultry grower for 33 years, so when he heard of this injustice, it hit close to home. He says Cooks had been experiencing financial difficulties and should not have allowed growers to enter into new contracts or receive new shipments of birds.
He reached out via letter to Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Dec. 8 to request emergency funding for farmers who were left with thousands of dead birds on their farms.
Department of Agriculture Secretary Wes Ward responded to King via letter, saying the proper role of government does not include state assumption of private debts. Poultry Division Director Patrick Fisk addressed a concerned group of poultry growers in a meeting about Cooks Venture closing and said he felt that it was the state's job to assist the company. King says he disagrees.
"I think that's so wrong- I don't even know where to begin. It's not his job to assist the company. It's his job to serve the taxpayers, and the citizens of Arkansas. That's his job. He's not supposed to be take the company line in this, which he did. The second thing is for us to clean up aspect of this when you're talking about, I think, as high as I've heard figures at 1.8 million chickens being depopulated. When you look at the overall situation. With that, the birds should have been processed and used for dog food. I mean, they should have forced the company to process the chickens that are that were out there in the field. That would have been the most ideal situation. And the state should have taken over the cleanup process. Much like they did the stump fire up in Bella Vista, much like the Mayflower oil spill, those types of situations when you have that kind of impact environmentally and everything. The state should have taken over this and then tried to get some money out of Cooks. The Secretary of Agriculture needs to investigate this and their actions because when I wrote the letter, and they denied it- they said it was a bailout. I mean, there was nothing any farther from the truth."
As of Friday, Jan. 19, Harp says she's still stuck in a contract with Cooks Venture and has had to pick up extra work outside of her farm to make ends meet.
Ozarks at Large reached out to Cooks Venture for comment but did not hear back in time for our reporting.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline by reporters. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
