Testimony concluded Friday in an animal-cruelty trial centering on one of the state's largest egg-production operations.

Esbenshade Farms owner and chief executive H. Glenn Esbenshade and farm manager Jay Musser face 35 counts of animal cruelty for alleged inhumane conditions at the Mount Joy farm. Each violation carries a potential fine of $50 to $750 and up to 90 days in prison.

Friday, defense attorneys Chris Patterson and Michael T. Winters asked District Judge Jayne Duncan for acquittal after prosecutors presented their last witness. Duncan denied the acquittal, and Patterson and Winters presented their case, which hinges on testimony from several witnesses who inspected some areas of the farm more than a month after the alleged violations were videotaped by undercover animal-rights activist John Brothers.

Brothers had obtained a job maintaining some of the farm's chicken houses.

University of Pennsylvania staff veterinarian Eric N. Gingerich testified he viewed the videotape, which reportedly contains images of mummified chicken carcasses in cages with live hens, heaps of dead birds and hens impaled on hooks and wires hanging from the cages. But Gingerich testified he didn't see any conditions like those on the videotape when he inspected Esbenshade Farms in January 2006, and he said he'd never seen similar conditions at any farms he ever visited.

Prosecuting attorney Dara Lovitz attempted to undermine Gingerich's testimony by asking him if he'd inspected the chicken houses where the alleged violations were videotaped.

Gingerich said he had inspected two of the three houses in question but that all the birds had been removed from one of them. Gingerich also said he had not read the citations outlining the alleged violations, so he didn't know which houses were involved in the case.

Gingerich conceded some of the dead birds in the videotape appeared to have dehydrated and starved to death after they were impaled and could not reach food and water. He said farm workers should have freed the birds before they starved, and he agreed with Lovitz that those cases constitute neglect.

Also testifying for the defense was Gregory Martin, an educator at Penn State Extension. Martin was along for the January 2006 inspection at Esbenshade Farms.

He said conditions at the farm were comparable to those at other farms of similar size he has visited. Martin said he found videotaped images of dead birds hanging from hooks above their cages "curious" because the hooks hang outside the cages.

He also questioned the large number of dead birds allegedly documented in Brothers' videotape because standard practice is to remove dead birds within 48 hours of death, if not sooner, and farm records documented dead birds were removed daily from cages.

Prosecuting attorneys Gordon Einhorn and Lovitz questioned Martin and Gingerich about funding their respective organizations receive from commercial egg-production companies to further research, education and promotion of the industry with consumers.

Both acknowledged their organizations have received industry grants, but said they did not know if Esbenshade Farms had provided any of the funding.

Neither Esbenshade nor Musser testified, but production manager Wayne Lehman took the stand. Lehman, who oversees poultry-house workers maintaining the operation's 500,000 hens, said he was unaware of any effort to clean up conditions at Esbenshade Farms before the January 2006 inspection.

Lehman emphasized profit margins are slim in egg production, so profits depend on properly caring for hens.

"I don't think you'd save any money by mistreating the birds," he said.

Brothers, who shot the videotape in December 2005, turned it over to Compassion Over Killing, a Washington, D.C.-based group advocating more humane conditions for animals on factory farms.

Compassion Over Killing asked Humane League Police Officer Johnna Seeton to view the tape. Seeton testified earlier she had pursued criminal charges against Esbenshade and Musser based on the content of Brothers' videotape.

Duncan said she expects to decide the case in mid-April, after attorneys from both sides have submitted final written comments on the case and she has reviewed two previous court decisions cited during the trial.

E-mail Susan Lindt at slindt@lnpnews.com.