TURNER – It’s a model of efficiency: row upon row of chickens, four or five to a cage, fed and watered by conveyor belt. Another conveyor carries away the eggs.

The numbers are staggering: 81,000 chickens in one 700-foot-long barn; seven barns at this plant and seven similar-sized plants on the 1,700-acre farm in Turner – 3.9 million chickens in all.

This plant is capable of harvesting, sanitizing and packing between 252,000 and 288,000 eggs per day, every day. The eggs are packed and shipped all over Maine and the East Coast, under a variety of labels.

But not Egg-land’s Best; not anymore.

Egg-land’s Best used to get its produce from this plant, registered as plant 1183 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To Bob Leclerc, compliance manager of Maine Contract Farming, it’s Plant No. 3.

The deal with Egg-land’s Best ended last week after an undercover animal rights advocacy group, Mercy for Animals, released video-recorded evidence of what it claims is chicken mistreatment at the farm. The video led state investigators to raid the building under a search warrant. Their investigation is ongoing.

“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?” Leclerc asked after leading an hour-long tour of the plant and its first barn. That included the hens’ enclosure, the manure pit on the floor below them and the sanitizing, inspecting and packing area.

Leclerc and the 100-plus employees at the plant have had a week to clean the place up, and it is a model of sanitary efficiency. The hallway outside of the first barn smells vaguely of soap. It could be a hallway in any Maine factory. The only distinction is the conveyor belt of eggs running down the right-hand side of the building.

The barn itself is cleaner than most would suspect. Once you get past the overwhelming stench of ammonia from the manure pile in the room below, the barn is almost pleasant. It’s quite a pile of manure, and it’s quite a smell – 81,000 chickens will do that.

But it is the same room where Mercy for Animals’ investigator recorded his video. That’s clear by looking at row upon row of light bulbs in the dim building, and the three tiers of conveyor-belt fed hens below.

But these don’t look like the bald, sick birds Mercy for Animals found. These hens are well kept, if shy. They lean curiously out of their cages, then huddle in the back corner when someone draws near.

“Our hens’ well-being is our top priority, because they are our livelihood and because its the right thing to do,” Leclerc said in a written statement. The company is retraining all of its farm workers in the proper hen-care, developing a new training program for new hires and creating new disciplinary standards for them.

“We try and do things right, but with a couple of hundred employees, you never know,” Leclerc said. “You never have enough supervision to go around. But it really behooves us to take care of our birds, because they take care of us.”

The chickens are born in a local breeding and hatching facility and come of age in another brooding barn. When they are old enough to produce eggs, they are sent to one of the facility’s egg farms. They’ll spend the next 80 to 85 weeks of their lives in cages, four to five birds per cage, producing eggs.

At that point, they’re shipped to a Boston butcher, and a new brood of birds is brought in.