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Birds gone, questions remain for Pure Prairie Poultry producer

After the fallout from Iowa-based Pure Prairie Poultry’s abrupt closure, a Wisconsin contract farmer says he gave all of the birds away.

Terry Filla tells Brownfield people came from near and far to take the free chickens. “Quite a few of them went over to Green Bay to one guy. He took probably 15,000. We’ve seen Illinois plates, Michigan plates, a lot of Minnesota, a lot of Wisconsin. Most of them are coming from three or four hours away.”

Filla says he’s cleaning out his two poultry barns now, and even though the crisis of trying to feed thousands of chickens has passed, he’s still worried. “Both me and my wife were with a lot of stress, still a lot of stress because we still don’t know where the money is going to come from pretty quick. Hopefully, they get their Packers and Stockyards stuff filled out so we can start getting our payments.”

Filla says he’d like to raise chickens again, but he will be a lot more careful next time and he will have experts including his banker look over any new contract proposal.

Pure Prairie Poultry shut down their Charles City, Iowa processing plant earlier this month, leaving more than a million birds with no processor and farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin with no feed and no payments.

Filla says he’s fortunate to have another source of income right now.  He also hauls milk from a western Wisconsin farm to Grassland Dairy Products in Greenwood.

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