When you've covered a topic long enough, you get the idea you've heard it all.

Then
along comes a factoid like the one I discovered while preparing my recent piece on
the recent blockbuster Consumer Reports study on supermarket chicken and
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I learned that at the industrial hatcheries that churn out
chicks for the poultry industry, eggs are commonly injected with tiny amounts of an
antibiotic called gentamicin, which is used in people to treat a variety of serious
bacterial infections.

That alone dropped my jaw—what, the practice of dosing chickens with antibiotics has to begin
literally in the egg? But get this: The practice is allowed in organic production, too. Organic code
forbids use of antibiotics in animals, yet in a loophole I'd never heard of, such standards kick in on "the
second day of life" for chicks destined for organic poultry farms. (The practice isn't used for the eggs
we actually eat—just the ones that hatch chicks to be raised on farms.)

John Glisson, a veterinarian for the US Poultry & Egg Association, told me the practice originated
decades ago, when the industry began vaccinating chicken embryos to prevent a common condition
called Marek's disease, a deadly herpes virus that attacks chickens. To sterilize the small hole required
to get the vaccine into the egg, the industry would shoot in a bit of gentamicin. Glisson added that it
remains a common practice, but that it has declined in recent years as (he insisted) the industry has
begun to move away from reliance on antibiotics. Neither Glisson nor the FDA could give me precise
data on how often it's used these days. The Food and Drug Administration allows such injections only
when prescribed by a veterinarian, a spokesperson said.

So what's the problem with giving chickens a little antibiotic boost as they start life? For starters, the
practice could promote the spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. A 2007 peer-reviewed study of
Maryland and Virginia workers in conventional chicken houses were 32 times more likely to carrying
gentamicin-resistant E. coli than their neighbors who don't work in the industry.

And Robert Martin, director of food system policy at Johns Hopkins' Center for a Livable Future,
expressed skepticism that cleaning up after a vaccine is the only function of the practice. He said that
while he was heading up the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production back in 2007, he
visited an industrial hatchery and witnessed the injections take place. "During the commission study
[completed in 2008], we learned that virtually every egg is injected with very small doses of gentamcin
before they go in the incubator," he said. In addition to sterilizing the egg, he pointed to another
possible benefit of the injections—that they "probably aid in rapid growth of the chick in the egg"—
i.e., growth promotion, one of the reasons industrial-scale livestock producers have been relying on
antibiotics for decades.

So why the loophole in organic? Bob Scowcroft, a veteran of organic-policy debates and now-retired
founder of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, explained to me that back in 1990, when the
Organic Foods Production Act was crafted, organic chicken production barely existed—and there were
certainly no organic hatcheries. It never occurred to anyone to require that chicks come from special
hatcheries, he said—such a rule would have crippled the industry from the start. "It was a chicken-and-
egg thing," he quipped.

Since then, as the organic-chicken market has boomed, there seems to have been little push to change
the second-day-of-life loophole. I contacted the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service about the
matter. Congress would need to amend the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 to remove the
exception.

That no one has tried to force such a change to strikes me as odd. In field crops, organic code requires
farmers to use organically grown seeds "when commercially available." That provision has given rise
to a still small, but robust and growing, organic seed market. The rise of organic seeds is crucial to the
future of organic farming, because plant strains adapted to heavy chemical use and monocrops don't
always do well in diversified, low-input systems, as organic-seed expert Matthew Dillon never tires of
pointing out. But until Congress adds a similar "when commercially available" requirement for
organically raised chicks, it's hard to imagine an organic-hatchery sector developing.
Nevertheless, change does appear to be afoot in the industry. Poultry behemoth Perdue, most known
for its conventional chicken, is also the nation's No. 1 organic chicken producer, through its Coleman
Natural, Rosie, and Draper brands, company spokesperson Julie DeYoung told me. And those brands
source their chicks from company-owned hatcheries that use no antibiotics, she said. The reason has to
do not with the organic label, but rather with another USDA-regulated label, the "raised without
antibiotics" tag, which also adorn the Perdue organic brands. (In its conventional operations, DeYoung
told me, Perdue has over the past five years removed antibiotics from 80 percent of its hatcheries.)

Back in 2008, the USDA determined that Perdue's rival chicken giant Tyson had been abusing that
label by subjecting eggs on hatcheries to gentamicin injections. Since then, any chicken brandishing
that label can't have ever been subjected to the controversial drug, not even in the egg. That is, "no
antibiotics" means no antibiotics—even before the second day of life. So on this narrow point, the
relatively new "no antibiotics" label has more teeth than the older and more formidable organic stamp.