Hickman’s Family Farms, the largest egg producer in the Southwest with operations in Maricopa on Murphy Road, will shut down most of its production for nearly two years following a recent bird flu outbreak.

The outbreak culled 6 million chickens amid federal vaccine delays, company officials claimed Friday.

Hickman’s operations in Maricopa and Colorado will continue to produce eggs, according to the company’s CEO, Glenn Hickman.

The culled chickens were mainly, if not exclusively, located in the Buckeye-Tonopah area. Hickman told reporters at a press conference yesterday that they reportedly shut down traffic between farms, but the virus spread throughout the West Valley and persisted anyway.

Hickman also shifted some responsibility, claiming vaccine delays contributed to the devastation.

“We need to access the vaccine that the federal government has already approved,” he said. “We need to be able to start giving it to our flocks.”

The cull comes after the federal government recently cancelled over $700 million in funding for Moderna’s bird flu mRNA vaccine rollout.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been publicly critical of bird flu vaccines and has openly advocated for the highly pathogenic virus to spread through poultry to leave farms with birds that have natural immunity.

Critics claim that immunity may lead to mutations in the virus, and even pathogenic spread to humans.

Animal Outlook, a national animal rights group, underestimated the outbreak’s impact earlier in the week, claiming 2.3 million birds may have died. Using that number, they estimated it could cost more than $38 million in taxpayer funds to recoup the costs for chicken culling. The USDA recently increased its compensation for culled birds to $16.94, more than double the previous amount.

Taxpayers can expect the recompensation estimate to at least double, based on the final cull figures.

Animal Outlook filmed what appeared to be the mass disposal of thousands of chickens at Hickman’s facility in Tonopah. InMaricopa published those videos earlier this week.

“This is great news for chickens,” said Ben Williamson, a spokesperson for Animal Outlook. “A two-year shutdown of Hickman’s Eggs represents a victory for the hens who would have been crammed into the company’s imposing sheds and reduced to egg-producing machines, and for the millions of male chicks who would have been ground up alive or suffocated simply for being born the wrong sex in an industry that has no use for them.”

The advocacy group urged Hickman’s to pursue plant-based farming.