Before Seattle-based Costco broke ground on its $280 million poultry operation in Fremont in 2017, Scott Niewohner remembers a conversation with his cousin about the pros and cons of building barns to raise chickens to supply the plant.
Chief among the cons, according to Niewohner’s cousin: daily retrieval of the dead birds scattered throughout the barns, which at a ‘typical’ capacity can contain up to 50,000 chickens at once.
“He said he wanted nothing to do with picking up all those dead birds every day,” Niewohner remembers.
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