The cutting off of the beaks, is that just so they won't bite people? What's the purpose of that besides causing infections and chronic pain?
Picture a fifth-grader stuck in a classroom desk for weeks on end, only with razor-sharp claws and teeth. Animals stuck in a cage unable to move get stressed and bored, and pick at anything they can reach - fights with each other, like Sterling said, and also excessive grooming and just worrying at themselves until all their feathers are plucked off and they've got open sores everywhere. That kind of stuff instantly renders the animal useless, they spend their entire lives coated in infected shit from a thousand other birds and God knows what else besides and any open wound will quickly overwhelm the massive antibiotic regimen that keeps them barely alive in the first place. IIRC they do roughly the same thing to pigs, don't know about cows etc.
Yeah, I'd bet money that the baby chick slurry that comes out the other end of that thing (which, once again, I'm really disappointed we didn't get to see) is used for something. In all seriousness, there's a very good chance it's fed back to the chickens. More likely, though, it's probably sold for use in fertilizer.
There's no way that stuff's usable as food. Chicken farms are disease pits that shorten the lifespans of people just driving by but even they won't try to feed anything ground-up meat that includes all the gut contents. There's some pretty funny stories about factory farms trying to use their waste byproducts as fertilizer (by funny I mean it poisons the ground and everyone involved gets sick and dies)
They're very thorough.
