Another former Chicken farmer here. Owner of a "factory farm" that sent over 2 million chicken's per year to your table. There are some serious diseases that can get into our operations. Biosecurity is very strict but you can't control the wild bird population from flying over and hanging around the ranch. In the past there have been several large outbreaks of some type of avian influenza that have caused large depopulation events. Once your farm gets infected, the only solution is to kill all the chickens in place and compost them onsite. Thankfully it never happened to me but a few years before I sold the farm several ranches nearby had to kill the entire flock, 300k-500k chickens all in one farm and compost them directly inside the barns and close the farm for several months until they could start over. This costs the farmer huge amounts of money and most can't survive going several months without getting paid. I don't think anyone is faking this.