Back in June, months before Austin “Jack” DeCoster became the national face of industrial chicken farming, we argued that a $34,000 fine leveled against his Turner mega-farm was too small.

At the time, DeCoster’s Maine Contract Farming was on the hot seat for animal cruelty violations secretly recorded during an investigation by an outside group.

The editorial pointed out DeCoster’s long history of labor and sanitation problems at his operations in Turner and in the Midwest.

The editorial was quickly followed by a rebuttal from Jay DeCoster, operations manager at the Turner farm, outlining the steps the farm has taken to correct various deficiencies.

Last week, Jack DeCoster appeared with another of his sons, Peter, the company’s chief executive officer, at a Congressional hearing into the salmonella outbreak.

Jack DeCoster said he was “horrified” to learn that his eggs had sickened about 1,300 customers, mumbling something about becoming “big” while still operating like they were “small.”

The explanation didn’t wash with congressional questioners, and the public shouldn’t buy it.

DeCoster has been big enough long enough to figure things out.

Instead, his hog and chicken farms have a long history of problems in every state in which they operate.

The Associated Press reported last week that Wright County Egg received 426 positive results for salmonella between 2008 and 2010, 73 of which were for salmonella enteritidis, the strain responsible for this summer’s outbreak.

The company had a positive test result for enteritidis on July 26, just three weeks before it finally recalled more than a half-billion eggs.

It’s a shame that neither DeCoster nor his employees were horrified enough to correct the problems before hundreds were sickened.

Equally disturbing was evidence that the positive reports were forwarded to the Agriculture Department’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories, showing that government regulators should have known of the threat long before hundreds of people were sickened.

If it’s not clear by now, it should be: Our fragmented regulatory system is broken and threatens our health and safety.

An Associated Press profile of DeCoster last week described him as a complex person, a born-again Christian who ministers to jail inmates and donates money to church and community projects.

That’s great, but it’s certainly hard to square that public-mindedness with DeCoster’s continuous record of skirting health, safety, immigration, labor and environmental laws.

“We were horrified to learn that our eggs may have made people sick,” DeCoster told the committee in a prepared statement. “We apologize to every one who may have been sickened by eating our eggs. I pray several times each day for all of them for their improved health.”

Again, that’s good, but it’s going to take much more to turn around the image of a lawless company that’s willing to cut corners to produce a profit.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com