units of production prevails.44 Rather, the factory farm dominates in such forms as the CAFO, and they are a shitstorm of “inevitable progress.” We cannot ignore the human, social, biological and environmental costs of the factory farm any more than the pollution, horrific social trauma and maimed and killed workers of the Industrial Revolution.
This book cannot give full attention to the social history of chicken factory farms, both because the subject requires its own complete study, and because the chicken itself is our focus. But the chicken itself extends far beyond the fields and broiler sheds to the homes and farms nearby, to the local banks and government, to social services and infrastructure, all of which seem to collapse under the weight of CAFOs – and smell none too good either. In CAFO farming, tautologically and dangerously, large farms dominate, and where there are large numbers of farms, the larger ones by far produce more animals. Their only concern is output of chicken units. CAFOs respond to shareholders and CEOs and other investors who are distant from the surrounding towns and the people in them. Who cares for and tends to the animals? These people are contract laborers, or migrant workers, who rarely receive such sufficient social benefits as insurance, and who face great financial uncertainty and challenging physical labor. It may be that Europe’s safety net makes a big difference for CAFO workers, but in most of the world these farmers live on the edge of economic uncertainty.
This is a hard life, dominated by obligations to integrators that control virtually all of the inputs, and the margins for success or failure are slim for the labor contractors, especially considering capital costs. A pair of broiler houses, with automated equipment for feeding and watering the birds, and climate control systems, mechanized equipment to gather broilers for shipment to processing plants (“chicken harvesters”) and to remove litter from the houses, can cost from $350,000 to $750,000. Broiler houses built in the last decade cover 20,000 square feet (40 feet wide and 500 feet long; approaching 1,900 square meters). In an average year, a single house might produce 115,000–135,000 broilers; few houses built recently are less than 20,000 square feet. Some grow-out operations have up to 18 houses, and this enables continuous production when some sheds undergo litter removal and upkeep.45 This is a radical change from the much smaller operations in the 1950s and 1960s, and who can afford these costs and these sheds?
The writer Paul Crenshaw gave a sense of the social costs of chicken factory farms when writing about the industrial transformation of Arkansas into a chicken coop. Arkansas, the home of Walmart, the largest company in the world by revenue, that sells inexpensive Chinese and other goods under the banner of “Made in America,” is also the home of Tyson, the largest chicken operator in the world. Crenshaw observes that Arkansas roads and highways are bordered with chicken factories and packing plants, and filled with trucks carrying birds – live for growing, and dead for sale. Beyond the strips of natural beauty, near streams and creeks and rivers, workers in factories push and prod the birds to maturity, and cut and drain them, transforming them in seconds into food. The guts and shit truly have no final resting place, but fill the air with acrid odor and the ground and water with toxic mess. Crenshaw refers to “gut trucks” that “weave along roads, leaving a swath of olfactory offense in their wake.” He notes the “chemistry lesson” required to understand the grotesqueries of decomposition.46 Crenshaw chronicles the scale of chicken houses, 100 yards long with 25,000 bird residents, tended to by poorly paid laborers who are cleaning, checking, carefully controlling lighting, fixing ventilation, regulating temperature, navigating rodents, maggots, flies and “the dead pits.” The dead pits, covered with concrete slabs, are cauldrons of crap. These houses are teaming with motion, all of it natural – yet none of it natural.47 No longer do chickens hunt and peck, find worms and bugs, and lounge in the shade. They are pushed and prodded, vaccinated and fed, in an artificial environment that limits their aggressiveness, packed tightly, to grow in vertically integrated factories like those of Tyson, in sheds like those of Tyson, to train their movements entirely to fattening and death. When they have been evacuated from the houses, laborers enter to fight the accumulated smell, feces and urine, fumigate and prepare the sheds for more sweet little chicks to begin the transformation into meat machines.48 The chickens shit in their food, and Crenshaw suggests that the way we raise them means that we defecate in our own food, too.
From Cage to Carcass
This book aims at a fuller understanding of the chicken raised in factory farms, perhaps as a Neo-Luddite might write it, hoping to promote realization about how industrial forces and capitalism changed what was a domesticated yard bird into a protein machine. If this can lead to greater regulation of the industry in the name of animal welfare, pollution control, public health and safety, then I will have succeeded in some small way in meeting my goal. But, above all else, this is a political and environmental history of the broiler, from its early domestication as a chicken, to a provider of the occasional egg or a one-time tough and sinewy meal, or as a meaningful religious symbol; to its appearance as a friend of the family, the farmer and as a collector’s item – Queen Victoria of England being among their admirers; to the factory farm. And it is a history of the chicken that has been transformed by humans from an active, social bird with an ecology of running, pecking and establishing a social (pecking) order that required sun, air, greens and exercise, to one entirely confined to a vanishingly small space, and intended to be chowed down after assembly-line execution before even reaching full maturity.
Through hybridization, and eventually through genetics, capitalism was joined with research and agriculture to build broiler birds with specific growth, fat, meat, enzyme, flavor and other properties. By 2000, just three firms in the world provided the vast majority of these magnificent meat machines through their breeder banks. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there has been a marked decline in the past half-century of farm livestock breeds, in large part because of this process. “Up to 30% of global mammalian and avian livestock breeds (i.e., 1,200 to 1,500 breeds) are currently at risk of being lost and cannot be replaced.”49 A Purdue University study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that 50 percent or more of ancestral chicken breeds have been lost, and that the greatest decline in chicken diversity took place in the 1950s with the introduction of industrial chicken production.50
In the late 1940s, encouraged by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P Supermarkets), thousands of farmers took part in “Chicken of Tomorrow” to present the best, meatiest breeds, which A&P intended to use in display cases around the nation to build America’s taste for chicken. These breeds have given way to the technologically superior broiler (meat generator) of factory farms: a faster-growing chicken with more meat on its bones. The birds are strong in meat, but, like any monoculture, prone to disease, foodborne and otherwise, and with skeletal, vision and other weaknesses. In many ways, they are an icon of CAFOs: meatier, but sicker, birds requiring more and more energy inputs, including antibiotics. They are chickens with an industrial essence. It is time for a new contest – a contest not for a new Chicken of Tomorrow, but rather for a new kind of agriculture, one that is less focused on corporate profits and more focused on producing strong healthy farms and food, that strengthens farm communities and supports local as well as distant markets.
Panopticon of Production
This book will follow the chicken historically from its farmyard frenzy into its bondage as a broiler. Chapter 1 celebrates the multicultural manifestations of the chicken as a glorious bird, its commonalities with humans (love of life, happiness in brooding and its manifestation as one of god’s creatures in a variety of ways) and its celebration in literature, art and music, from religious sacrifice and cockfighting to a plaything of the wealthy, and always as a hunting and pecking farmyard friend, even if destined for consumption, from domestication to the eve of the twentieth century.
Chapter 2 explores the ecology of chickens and how ideas and understandings of chicken behavior, health and habitat have significantly changed – perhaps it is more accurate to say “have been changed” – since the turn