France heatwave kills hundreds of thousands of chickens

Hundreds of thousands of chickens died in France as late-June heat hammered the country’s main poultry basins, overwhelming carcass collection services and forcing authorities to consider emergency on-farm burial in some cases. The losses hit both indoor and outdoor farms, showing how extreme heat can ripple from animal welfare into farm economics, processing logistics, and the stability of poultry supply.

The heaviest toll fell in Brittany and Pays de la Loire, which together account for nearly 60% of France’s poultry flock. Pays de la Loire alone represented a quarter of national poultry production in 2021, and the two regions concentrated 56% of the country’s poultry flocks that year. That concentration means a heatwave in western France can quickly become a national food-supply problem, not just a local farm crisis.

The scale of the sector helps explain the pressure. The Confédération Française de l’Aviculture says France has nearly 14,000 poultry farms, and a standard operation averages two poultry houses and about 40,000 birds. FranceAgriMer says a typical poultry house holds about 20,000 birds, leaving little margin when temperatures surge and birds begin dying in large numbers. The industry group ANVOL said the death toll was still preliminary, but it confirmed excess mortality on both indoor and outdoor farms.

Individual farms were left counting losses in real time. In Beauvoir-sur-Mer, breeder Stéphane Delapré said the June 22 heat killed roughly half of his 17,600 chickens. In Pays de la Loire, poultry farmer Clément Blanchard said he lost about 700 chickens over a few days, compared with only one or two a day under normal conditions. Those figures underline how quickly heat stress can turn a routine farming operation into a mass-casualty event.

France reached 44.3C, or 111.7F, during the heatwave, and extreme temperatures were expected to persist for days. The wider European heatwave also brought deaths of dozens of people, school closures, power outages, and nighttime grain harvests, but in western France the immediate damage was visible in poultry houses and disposal yards. With carcass collection services overwhelmed, agricultural bodies were pushed toward measures that would normally remain last-resort options, exposing how vulnerable industrial animal production becomes when climate extremes collide with tightly concentrated supply chains.