After the snowstorm hit Texas last month, Sam Miller and his family thought they had managed to get through the worst of it unscathed. Their family egg farm and the 30 acres it sits on in Pickton, about 90 miles northeast of Dallas in Hopkins County, were blanketed in thick snow and ice, but they still had water and sporadic electricity. They were lucky.
But as the temperature began to sink to record lows, a disaster was about to unfold in the barn that housed their 11,500 laying hens. It would bring the small farm, which supplies eggs to restaurants and markets around Dallas-Fort Worth, to its knees.
Like many farms and ranches in rural Texas, Cedar Ridge Egg Farm is in a small county that was left out of federal disaster aid eligibility despite suffering the same disaster and some of the same kinds of damage as big cities.
Gov. Greg Abbott requested a federal disaster declaration for all of Texas’ 254 counties in the wake of the storm, but the Biden administration so far has not approved 128 of those counties, Hopkins included, for federal assistance.
Without federal disaster relief, recovery is close to impossible for small businesses like the Millers’ that suffered devastating losses and damage.
Three days after the first snowfall, Miller awoke before sunrise to the horrifying discovery that a forgotten pipe in the barn’s ceiling had burst overnight, flooding the barn and drenching the thousands of Bovans Brown hens. He and his family rushed to get the chickens out of the building, but some were already dead from hypothermia.
The Millers dried off as many hens as they could and laid down fresh bedding after pumping out all of the water. They tried desperately to warm up the barn, but the electricity went on and off every 15 minutes, and the backup generator could do only so much against the frigid temperatures. The chickens were cold, wet and getting sick.
“It wasn’t bad when the cold hit the first few days, but then once the water broke, that’s when it all went to [expletive],” Miller said in an unhurried Texas drawl.
In the hours after the pipe burst, hundreds of chickens died, and in the days that followed, up to 90 chickens a day succumbed to pneumonia. In total, about 1,000 chickens died after the burst pipe, but that wasn’t the greatest loss.
Since the storm, all but 1% to 2% of the surviving 10,500 hens stopped laying eggs. Days of inconsistent power meant the lamps in the barn that counter the lack of sunlight during the winter and trigger the chickens’ reproductive cycle flicked on and off in short intervals, which threw the chickens into a molt, causing them to lose and regrow their feathers and stop producing eggs.
“It was very, very bad for us. We’re probably fixin’ to have to go out of business,” Miller said.
Before the storm, Cedar Ridge Egg Farm sold up to 10,000 eggs daily to the likes of Virgin Hotel Dallas and Elm & Good restaurant and was the primary egg supplier for Eataly Dallas. Now, only about 1,000 eggs are laid a day.
Stress and lingering sickness from the cold also contributed to the chickens’ inability to produce eggs, prompting Miller to make the difficult decision to sell off all the chickens for meat. He secured a new batch of 8,000 hens with the hope that he’d be able to kick-start his business again, but between the daily expenses of feeding and caring for the chickens and the $40,000 or so it will cost to repair the barn, Miller doesn’t know how he’ll afford to keep going.
His insurance company said it would not cover the damage to the barn because his plan doesn’t cover burst water lines, and without federal disaster aid, he is left to come up with the money for starting over himself or shut down his business.
Ranchers and farmers across the state lost at least $600 million in the winter storm, according to a recent estimate by economists at the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The freeze killed crops and livestock alike, and recovery could take years for some producers. It could also increase prices of chicken, eggs and other goods at grocery stores.
Dr. David Anderson, a professor and economist in the agricultural economics department at Texas A&M University, said livestock and fruits and vegetables were hit the hardest. Freeze damage wiped out much of the state’s citrus, which could take several years to restore, and many ranchers lost calves to the cold.
Like Cedar Ridge, plenty of other farms also experienced significant loss from burst pipes, Anderson said. He anticipates that many more stories like Miller’s will surface as damage continues to be reported and calculated.
Tom Bates, the egg farm co-owner who handles the administrative aspects of the business while Miller oversees the hens, can’t understand why Hopkins County was left out of disaster relief.
“Where is the government support? They have not made any attempt to help anyone in Hopkins County, which is full of farms that had busted water lines,” he said. “This is not a failure of bad business, this is a disaster.”
He’s holding out hope that the county might eventually be eligible for disaster aid, or that by some miracle the farm will come up with the money it needs to keep going. There’s too much at stake not to be hopeful.
“If we can’t fix this and quick, we’re going to lose everything,” Bates said. “And for Sam that means losing his home and family land.”
