BOSTON -- A New England farm that supplies thousands of eggs to grocery stores in Massachusetts was raided Wednesday on charges it kept chickens in cages with rotting corpses.

NewsCenter 5’s Sean Kelly reported that the Maine farm, operated by Maine Contract Farming LLC, was raided Wednesday after an animal rights group submitted video footage of alleged abuses inside the factory farm facility.

Quality Egg, the largest egg producer in New England, is one of the firms that packaged and sold eggs produced in the facility. The company supplies 65,000 eggs every week to chain stores like Shaw's and Stop & Shop, according to its Web site. The eggs are packaged under a variety of different brand names and distributed in several states, including Massachusetts.

The group Mercy For Animals released a video shot by a private investigator that shows hens badly injured and sick, cramped inside tiered, wire pens at the Turner, Maine, farm.

“The hens in the battery cages are oftentimes forced to produce eggs in cages with extremely rotting corpses of other birds who’ve died because they were unable to access food or water,” said Daniel Hauff, of Mercy For Animals.

Professors in veterinary medicine said the cages are standard throughout the industry, but the overall conditions are a glaring violation. Mercy For Animals filed a complaint to Maine’s Department of Agriculture detailing the evidence the group collected over the course of a six-week investigation.

In the complaint, the group alleges workers at the facility threw living birds into trash cans, leaving them to die, and kept others packed tightly in cages where they could not access food or water.

The group said that it also found repeated evidence of chickens being whipped around by their necks. They said workers would swing the birds around in circle to try to kill them, but instead, the hens would slowly suffer until they died.

“Workers and supervisors would swing them around in an attempt to kill them and many of these hens would then suffer and have a slow, painful death, and callously kick them into manure pits,” said Hauff.

Bob LeClair, a safety compliance officer at the farm, said the facility operators are cooperating fully with the state investigation, and he said that the alleged abuses documented on video were committed by only three of the farm’s workers.

"It's not the kind of behavior we expect,” said LeClair. “We've identified those employees and we will meet with them today."

Shaw's released a statement saying the company will investigate the allegations, and that it will continue to monitor and ensure compliance of the vendor community with required humane processing of animals consistent with government regulations.

State police and the district attorney’s office in Turner, Maine, raided the company’s factory farm facility on Wednesday.

“They have told us that they have substantiated the things we found in the facility as well,” said Hauff.

A representative from Stop & Shop said that the company is also concerned about the allegations against the egg supplier and that it would look into the matter. In a statement released Thursday, the company said it “does not have a relationship” with Quality Egg, and said that it uses a third party company to audit its food suppliers to ensure they are in compliance with industry standards.

“We will continue to monitor this situation and take appropriate action if any of our egg suppliers is not in compliance with these standards,” the company said in the statement.

Mercy For Animals is asking both Shaw's and Stop and Shop to discontinue their business with the company.