At midnight one day in spring 2023, a team of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a massive chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was raising some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken company.
When the investigator Joseph Allman entered one of the facility’s sprawling barns, he found chickens packed wall to wall, including three dead, decaying birds. The place smelled “awful and noxious,” he said, and as he waded through the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman found plenty more dead animals. Right outside the barn, Allman told me recently, there was a massive pile of manure “completely littered with dead bodies and body parts.”
Over the following year, the investigators returned to the farm and also visited another operation in the area raising birds for Mountaire, where they found similar conditions. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there were multiple birds “unable to reach food or water due to severe limb deformity and disease, or because they are stuck on their backs and unable to get up.” Several dead birds, the footage showed, had been “left to decompose for days to weeks,” according to Rosenberg.
The investigators also obtained a trove of inspection documents from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses through a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed instances of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to death, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.
Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US attorney, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the conditions documented constitute criminal animal cruelty under Maryland state law. The activists have sent Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary analysis to a number of county and state authorities requesting an investigation into the company and charges for animal cruelty. They haven’t received much interest.
Mountaire alleges that early one morning in mid-February, Allman and his colleague Adam Durand posed as AT&T contractors to gain access to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They were later arrested for criminal impersonation — a charge which was soon dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to remove the charge from their records in exchange for one year of no contact with Mountaire, Allman told me. Mountaire sued the two in early March for trespassing.
“This lawsuit isn’t about protecting their business — it’s about silencing whistleblowers,” Allman wrote to me in response to the lawsuit. Durand declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Mountaire Farms declined an interview request for this story, but emailed a statement to Vox. The company said it requires its contract farmers to “follow sound poultry management practices that conform to practices of good animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to comment further on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.
However grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re far from unusual. At US chicken factory farms, overcrowded, unhygienic conditions are so common that 6 percent of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens that have been bred to be unhealthily large — die on the farm each year before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That adds up to more than half a billion unnecessary deaths.
The alleged conditions on Mountaire’s chicken facilities show one of the major ills of the factory farming system in the US, one shared by other companies in the industry: an almost willful disregard for the welfare of the animals they raise. But Mountaire also demonstrates to a greater extent than any other poultry company a less widely known way in which the factory farming system’s tentacles work their way into American life: the industry’s ties to a right-wing, deregulatory political agenda.
While Republican politicians and meat companies have long been intertwined — almost 80 percent of the industry’s political contributions in the 2024 election cycle went to Republicans — Mountaire and its wealthy but little-known CEO Ronald Cameron show just how deep those ties can go. Cameron, who at times has been a top donor to President Donald Trump, far outspends others in the poultry industry in an apparent effort to bend US politics toward his hard-right beliefs, and seemingly to protect and expand a poultry empire that produces roughly 1 out of every 13 chickens consumed in America today, even if relatively few people have ever heard of it.
How Mountaire Farms has fueled a right-wing business and political agenda
In 2016, Cameron and his wife gave millions to Trump-aligned PACs, which made him one of the biggest donors to Trump. Across the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, Cameron gave another $4.7 million.
Cameron has also contributed to several current and former House Freedom Caucus members and far-right Senate candidates, as well as over $14 million to political action committees (PACs) linked to the Koch Brothers and over $2 million to PACs operated by the Club for Growth.
All told, Cameron has given around $75 million to candidates, PACs, and state parties since 2014 — over 99 percent of it to Republicans — making him one of the 50 biggest political contributors in recent election cycles.
While the direction of Cameron’s dollars isn’t unusual in the meat industry, the scale of giving dwarfs that of his competitors. Since 1990, the largest chicken companies have given — through their employees — anything from tens of thousands to a few million dollars each, with similar spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it should be noted, doesn’t spend on lobbying at all.) The only company that comes close is Tyson Foods, which has spent $35 million on lobbying since 1998 and whose employees have given approximately $7.7 million to political candidates and organizations since 1990. However, Tyson Foods is a much bigger company than Mountaire, with 20 times the annual revenue. It’s a top producer of beef and pork, too.
All the while, according to Glassdoor salary reporting, Mountaire Farms’ frontline slaughterhouse employees make minimum wage or slightly above it to perform one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Mountaire workers have accused the company of retaliation, discrimination, denial of bathroom breaks, union-busting, wage-fixing, and exposure to harmful chemicals. In 2020, an employee interviewed by the New Yorker called the work “slavery.” Mountaire did not respond to Vox for a request for comment about allegations made by its employees.
The company has also been accused of creating severe environmental pollution. In 2021, Mountaire agreed to a historic $205 million deal to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its slaughterhouses had contaminated the drinking water and air quality of nearby residents. “While Mountaire does not believe that it caused any damage to any of the plaintiffs, it chose to settle the case in order to achieve a final resolution and to allow construction of a new wastewater treatment plant to proceed,” the company said in a statement at the time.
Environmental pollution is a consistent problem for the meat industry, and Cameron’s political generosity has coincided with beneficial political action for Mountaire on exactly that subject.
In Maryland, where corporations are restricted from giving political candidates large sums of money, Mountaire funneled $250,000 into the Republican Governors Association days before the 2014 election, which it spent on ads to elect Republican Maryland governor Larry Hogan.
On inauguration day, Hogan rescinded regulations pertaining to how much animal manure can be spread onto crop fields as fertilizer — a notorious source of water pollution on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Allman and his colleagues investigated Mountaire chicken operations. Weeks later, Hogan proposed a watered-down version with a loophole for the poultry industry. A spokesperson for Hogan told the Wall Street Journal that Hogan “had no knowledge of [Mountaire’s] involvement with the Republican Governors Association.”
In the middle of April 2020, Trump picked Cameron to serve as an economic adviser to the White House on its strategy to reopen parts of the economy in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump signed an executive order mandating that slaughterhouses remain open to their extent possible, even as they became Covid hot spots — including Mountaire slaughterhouses.
That same day, the Department of Labor issued a statement that essentially immunized meat companies from being held accountable if they didn’t adhere to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 guidelines so long as they had at least demonstrated a “good faith” effort to do so. Around the same time, the US Department of Agriculture permitted 15 slaughterhouses — including one of Mountaire’s — to speed up their slaughter lines from 140 birds per minute to 175.
Why the meat industry gives so much to Republicans
Mountaire may stand out in the size of its contributions to right-wing politicians and groups, but the broader meat and dairy industry gives overwhelmingly to Republicans.
The industry’s political favoritism can be explained in part by geography; animal agriculture is concentrated in rural states where politicians are much more likely to be Republican. But it can also be explained in part by ideology; Congressional Republicans tend to prefer deregulation, which benefits meat, dairy, and egg companies.
Cameron and his company — along with his competitors — benefit from deregulation at each link in the supply chain that Congress and regulatory agencies could change but don’t. Poultry farms are exempt from numerous animal welfare laws and are largely exempt from key environmental laws. The Department of Labor, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has failed to keep slaughterhouse abuses in check. A lot of the farmers that raise chickens for big poultry companies get screwed over, too.
But while Republicans may financially benefit disproportionately from the industry’s largesse, Democrats tend to be anything but tough on the meat industry.
“While conservatives have consistently pushed more aggressive, pro-agribusiness policies,” food policy expert Nathan Rosenberg and journalist Bryce Wilson Stucki wrote in a 2017 story for The Counter, “liberals have often responded with pro-agribusiness policies of their own, even when that meant undermining their own natural allies: small and mid-sized farmers, farm workers, rural minority populations, and the small, independent businesses they support.” I saw that reality myself when I wrote last year about the cozy relationship between the meat industry and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s VP pick.
There’s no clear path to breaking the meat industry’s grip over American politics on the horizon, but there is something anyone can do — starting today — to push back against the kinds of horrific allegations made against Mountaire and other poultry giants: Eat less chicken.
In 2022, the US raised and slaughtered a record-breaking 9.2 billion of them — 24 per person after accounting for poultry exports. Chicken may be branded as a healthier, more sustainable alternative to beef and pork, but its mass production and consumption — whether from Mountaire or its competitors — relies on unimaginable human and animal suffering.
“We’re up against a really big system that seems really entrenched right now,” said Durand, one of the activists, “and we are just trying to do whatever we can to disrupt that.”
