They didn't own the birds. They were essentially tenant farmers leasing somebody else's chickens.
You wrote "you cant just replace millions of birds across the country in a heartbeat when demand goes up." -- exactly right! It takes a while to replace that lost livestock. What an utterly ridiculous situation, all because our supply chains and federal regs can't be quickly adjusted to move those eggs to supermarkets. People are lining up for free food all over the country and we are killing livestock.
This happened during the Great Depression, too. You'd think we were smarter than those folks 85 years ago...
During the early years of the Depression, livestock prices dropped disastrously. Officials with the New Deal believed prices were down because farmers were still producing too many commodities like hogs and cotton. The solution proposed in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was to reduce the supply.
So, in the late spring of 1933, the federal government carried out "emergency livestock reductions." In Nebraska, the government bought about 470,000 cattle and 438,000 pigs. Nationwide, six million hogs were purchased from desperate farmers. In the South, one million farmers were paid to plow under 10.4 million acres of cotton.
The hogs and cattle were simply killed. In Nebraska, thousands were shot and buried in deep pits. Farmers hated to sell their herds, but they had no choice. The federal buy-out saved many farmers from bankruptcy, and AAA payments became the chief source of income for many that year.
