WEBVTT - Beak Capitalism, Part 2: The Chickenization of Everything 0:00:03.120 --> 0:00:09.000 Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. 0:00:15.800 --> 0:00:18.599 But besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of 0:00:18.680 --> 0:00:22.720 tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Here's an example 0:00:22.760 --> 0:00:28.240 of the progress that's been made already. Notice how breeding 0:00:28.320 --> 0:00:33.200 has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look 0:00:33.200 --> 0:00:37.760 at that drumstick. This bird was fattened in the same 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:40.680 length of time and on the same amount of feed 0:00:40.720 --> 0:00:43.479 as the other one. Thank your own guess as to 0:00:43.560 --> 0:00:45.160 which is the more profitable to raise. 0:00:47.600 --> 0:00:51.040 For much of America's history, chickens look different to the 0:00:51.040 --> 0:00:55.120 way they do today. They were thin, elegant, even slim 0:00:55.160 --> 0:00:57.840 and upright. The average bird weighed about two and a 0:00:57.880 --> 0:01:01.120 half pounds in the nineteen twenties, and chickens were raised 0:01:01.160 --> 0:01:04.760 differently too, on small farms and homesteads. The birds and 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:08.240 their eggs provided a valuable source of extra protein and 0:01:08.280 --> 0:01:15.240 the occasional Sunday roast for millions of Americans. 0:01:15.520 --> 0:01:19.880 But today chickens are front loaded feathered freaks. After years 0:01:19.880 --> 0:01:21.800 of commercial breeding, the weight of your run of the 0:01:21.840 --> 0:01:24.720 mill roaster has more than doubled to a chunky five 0:01:24.880 --> 0:01:27.600 or six pounds, way more than chickens of the past. 0:01:28.040 --> 0:01:32.520 Chickens as our great grandparents would have understood them looked 0:01:32.800 --> 0:01:38.360 very different from chickens today. They were scrawny, they were rangier, 0:01:38.560 --> 0:01:41.759 they could move around a barnyard, and they could flap 0:01:41.840 --> 0:01:47.280 up into trees and avoid predators. And that's almost nothing 0:01:47.400 --> 0:01:49.640 like the chickens that we eat today. So if you 0:01:49.680 --> 0:01:54.080 went back to the time of I guess our great grandparents, 0:01:54.120 --> 0:01:57.960 let's say, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people 0:01:58.080 --> 0:02:03.160 didn't eat chicken that and that seems very bizarre to 0:02:03.240 --> 0:02:06.600 us now in the era when there are a million 0:02:06.680 --> 0:02:09.679 forms of chicken nuggets in the cold case at the 0:02:09.720 --> 0:02:13.520 supermarket and there's a chicken sandwich on every corner. But 0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:16.080 chicken used to be kind of special. 0:02:21.600 --> 0:02:25.000 Welcome to the second installment of Beat Capitalism, our add 0:02:25.040 --> 0:02:28.520 thoughts special series in which we are examining the US 0:02:28.560 --> 0:02:32.160 economy through the lens of chicken. If you haven't listened 0:02:32.200 --> 0:02:35.200 to our first episode where we talked about chicken prices 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:38.640 and the consumer experience of eating chickens and eggs, you 0:02:38.639 --> 0:02:40.200 should definitely go back and do that. 0:02:40.960 --> 0:02:43.240 In this episode, we're going to focus on the birds 0:02:43.280 --> 0:02:46.800 themselves and the people that grow them, because chicken actually 0:02:46.840 --> 0:02:48.639 has a lot to say about the structure of the 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:51.480 labor market too, and the relationship between big companies and 0:02:51.480 --> 0:02:54.239 their workers. And a lot has changed from the backyard 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:55.240 birds of yesteryear. 0:03:04.440 --> 0:03:07.280 To understand what's happened to chickens and the people who 0:03:07.280 --> 0:03:10.560 grow them, it helps to consider where they started from. 0:03:10.760 --> 0:03:14.200 Maren McKenna is a journalist and author who specializes in 0:03:14.200 --> 0:03:17.680 public health, and she wrote a book called appropriately Enough, 0:03:18.040 --> 0:03:18.720 Big Chicken. 0:03:19.360 --> 0:03:21.600 As we said, chickens used to be a lot. Smaller 0:03:22.000 --> 0:03:24.519 families might keep a few egg layers in their backyards, 0:03:24.520 --> 0:03:26.639 and once the birds reached the end of their laying life, 0:03:26.680 --> 0:03:29.480 they might be put in the proverbial pot. One key 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:31.480 thing is that chicken meat, for a long time was 0:03:31.520 --> 0:03:32.640 a tree, not a stable. 0:03:33.080 --> 0:03:33.360 Now. 0:03:33.400 --> 0:03:36.080 As a rule, older chickens that have been running around 0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:40.280 a backyard don't usually taste as good. They're leaner, they're chewier, 0:03:40.560 --> 0:03:43.560 and there just aren't that many of them compared to today's 0:03:43.640 --> 0:03:47.480 industrial scale farming. But things started to change in the 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:51.480 nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. To satisfy increased demand for 0:03:51.560 --> 0:03:55.400 chicken meat, farmers started scaling up and raising their birds 0:03:55.400 --> 0:03:58.360 in big chicken houses. We'll talk more about those in 0:03:58.600 --> 0:03:59.240 just a little bit. 0:04:00.160 --> 0:04:03.160 In the nineteen forties, after the Second World War, something 0:04:03.200 --> 0:04:05.200 big happen on the way to Big Chicken. 0:04:06.800 --> 0:04:10.560 To understand where the industrialization of chicken comes from, and 0:04:10.880 --> 0:04:14.440 after that the industrialization of almost all the other proteins 0:04:14.480 --> 0:04:17.560 that we eat, you really have to go back to 0:04:18.640 --> 0:04:20.479 the middle to the end of World War II, and 0:04:20.560 --> 0:04:23.279 a couple of things are happening at the same time. 0:04:24.200 --> 0:04:27.279 The first is that there's a war on and there's 0:04:27.760 --> 0:04:31.120 a lot of soldiers and sailors deployed around the globe 0:04:31.320 --> 0:04:34.400 who need to be fed, so there's a great deal 0:04:34.400 --> 0:04:39.320 of pressure on meat producers to increase their production. Pressure 0:04:39.360 --> 0:04:41.800 that goes away when the war is over, and when 0:04:41.800 --> 0:04:45.920 that guaranteed market from the military forces suddenly vanishes, leaving 0:04:46.000 --> 0:04:50.440 them pretty over extended. The second is that immediately after 0:04:50.480 --> 0:04:54.240 World War two, kind of extraordinarily, there are a number 0:04:54.279 --> 0:04:58.640 of extreme weather events in growing areas around the globe. 0:04:58.640 --> 0:05:02.159 There are typhoons, there are storms, and this is added 0:05:02.200 --> 0:05:06.400 to the destruction of growing areas that occurred during the 0:05:06.440 --> 0:05:11.960 war and the destruction of naval fleets and of fishing vessels. 0:05:12.320 --> 0:05:17.120 So there's both an over extension of meat production and 0:05:17.200 --> 0:05:20.680 also a sense of frigility of the food system. 0:05:20.839 --> 0:05:23.640 It was against this backdrop the biologist Thomas Jukes entered 0:05:23.720 --> 0:05:26.080 the picture. With more and more chickens now being kept 0:05:26.080 --> 0:05:28.280 in big houses, the birds were no longer able to 0:05:28.320 --> 0:05:30.479 forage for bugs and grubs and graints on their own. 0:05:30.560 --> 0:05:33.240 They needed help to survive indoors, and that's where Jukes 0:05:33.279 --> 0:05:33.640 comes in. 0:05:34.720 --> 0:05:36.760 Jukes was attached to a team that had produced the 0:05:36.760 --> 0:05:40.360 first antibiotic of the tetracyclines that we still use today. 0:05:40.520 --> 0:05:44.039 It was called oreomycin. He also happened to have been 0:05:44.080 --> 0:05:47.760 given an assignment to address the dietary needs of chickens 0:05:48.279 --> 0:05:52.440 because part of the issue of the meat industry feeling 0:05:52.520 --> 0:05:54.760 over extended after the end of World War II was 0:05:54.800 --> 0:05:57.440 that they felt they needed to cut costs. This is 0:05:57.520 --> 0:06:00.159 actually the point at which we start entering in to 0:06:00.320 --> 0:06:04.159 the part of American agricultural history where livestock starts getting 0:06:04.200 --> 0:06:06.919 fed a lot of grain, but there was concern that 0:06:07.000 --> 0:06:09.360 grain didn't have a full nutritional profile, and so they 0:06:09.360 --> 0:06:13.200 were looking for inexpensive supplements, and in a very famous experiment, 0:06:13.760 --> 0:06:16.960 Jukes bought a whole bunch of baby chicks, divided them 0:06:17.000 --> 0:06:20.839 into groups gave each group some kind of supplement that 0:06:21.040 --> 0:06:24.040 was available on the market at the time, cod liver oil, 0:06:24.320 --> 0:06:29.800 synthesized vitamins, brewers yeast. To one group, he gave the 0:06:29.960 --> 0:06:34.360 ground up dried remains of the growing medium in which 0:06:34.800 --> 0:06:38.919 his company's drug had been made, oreomycin, and when he 0:06:39.240 --> 0:06:42.280 assessed the results of the experiment on Christmas Day in 0:06:42.320 --> 0:06:45.640 nineteen forty eight, he found that the chicks in his 0:06:45.720 --> 0:06:50.640 experiment who'd been given the oreomcein leftovers, had gained more 0:06:50.680 --> 0:06:54.640 weight than any other set of animals in the experiment, 0:06:55.279 --> 0:06:59.839 and from that recognition, an entire industry of giving an 0:07:00.080 --> 0:07:06.360 biotics to animals began. Jukes called that effect growth promotion, 0:07:06.640 --> 0:07:09.000 and they filed for a patent for the. 0:07:09.120 --> 0:07:12.160 So The introduction of growth promoters helped the birds survive 0:07:12.240 --> 0:07:15.200 the great indoors and get bigger. But that wasn't the 0:07:15.280 --> 0:07:16.600 last of the chicken revolution. 0:07:17.200 --> 0:07:21.880 One was that chickens themselves changed physically, thanks largely to 0:07:21.920 --> 0:07:25.400 the US Department of Agriculture, which in the late nineteen 0:07:25.440 --> 0:07:29.720 forties and early nineteen fifties sponsored a contest among chicken 0:07:29.760 --> 0:07:33.320 breeders called the Chicken of Tomorrow. 0:07:33.640 --> 0:07:39.800 Help in developing the Chicken of tomorrow. You can't take 0:07:39.800 --> 0:07:42.600 it regretted that every hand is earning her keeper. Even 0:07:42.600 --> 0:07:45.280 though laying an egg ought to be easy for any. 0:07:45.120 --> 0:07:49.240 Chicken, that's a few thing big twe. 0:07:51.560 --> 0:07:51.800 Well. 0:07:52.840 --> 0:07:54.280 Anyhow, the idea of. 0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:58.200 The Chicken of Tomorrow contest was to make chickens meteor 0:07:58.880 --> 0:08:02.400 to produce a bird that would have more breast, that 0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:05.800 would have big enough to feed a family, which was 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:08.760 kind of hard at that point for a four or 0:08:08.800 --> 0:08:11.680 five person family to eat one chicken and be satisfied, 0:08:12.040 --> 0:08:15.320 and also to be very predictable in a number of ways, 0:08:15.360 --> 0:08:17.560 to be a single breed. And after a couple of 0:08:17.600 --> 0:08:22.200 years of competition, the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest produced the 0:08:22.280 --> 0:08:26.200 prototype for the most of the chickens that are raised today. 0:08:27.520 --> 0:08:34.280 Blocky muscles, white feathered, docile, not interested in running around 0:08:34.280 --> 0:08:36.760 a barnyard and flapping up into a tree, content to 0:08:36.800 --> 0:08:38.040 sit in one place. 0:08:38.720 --> 0:08:41.760 So antibiotics and breeding helped turn the chicken of tomorrow 0:08:41.800 --> 0:08:42.800 into the chicken of today. 0:08:43.280 --> 0:08:46.320 Well that's not quite all. Actually, a lot of things 0:08:46.320 --> 0:08:49.200 were happening on the chicken innovation front around that time. 0:08:49.960 --> 0:08:53.360 The second thing that drove the difference between the Chicken 0:08:53.400 --> 0:08:56.880 of yesterday and the chicken of tomorrow is that we 0:08:57.080 --> 0:09:02.679 changed our orientation to how we eat chicken from buying 0:09:02.760 --> 0:09:05.360 birds that were whole and had to be roasted or 0:09:05.400 --> 0:09:07.640 cut up into pieces and had to be pan fried 0:09:07.760 --> 0:09:12.559 or broiled into a source of protein that was disassembled 0:09:13.000 --> 0:09:17.880 at the manufacturing level into things like nuggets, so that 0:09:18.000 --> 0:09:21.480 people could consume chicken without having to deal with the 0:09:21.520 --> 0:09:23.920 physical reality of a chicken. 0:09:24.440 --> 0:09:27.280 It's hard to imagine a world without chicken nuggets now, 0:09:27.640 --> 0:09:30.760 but as Marin lays out, it wasn't until the nineteen 0:09:30.840 --> 0:09:33.480 sixties that these became a thing, and it was a 0:09:33.600 --> 0:09:36.840 very deliberate decision. After all, if you want to sell 0:09:36.880 --> 0:09:39.640 more chicken, you have to get people to eat more chicken, 0:09:39.920 --> 0:09:42.160 and one way of doing that is giving them more 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:45.880 options to consume it. And then boom, the chicken nugget 0:09:45.960 --> 0:09:48.880 was born, and these little nuggets of chicken proved to 0:09:48.960 --> 0:09:54.960 be pure gold for some businesses like McDonald's McDonald's, Yes 0:09:55.320 --> 0:09:57.839 and Joe. You might be surprised to find out that 0:09:57.960 --> 0:10:02.280 McDonald's didn't actually invent the chick and nugget. Here's Marin again. 0:10:02.480 --> 0:10:04.280 So we all think of the chicken nugget as a 0:10:04.320 --> 0:10:07.360 creation of McDonald's, and certainly McDonald's would claim that the 0:10:07.440 --> 0:10:11.520 chicken nugget is their thing. Introduced in the late seventies, 0:10:11.600 --> 0:10:14.360 by nineteen eighty they were blowing the doors off in 0:10:14.480 --> 0:10:18.480 the McDonald's restaurants where they were sort of secretly introduced. 0:10:19.440 --> 0:10:23.640 But it's pretty widely understood in the poultry industry that 0:10:23.760 --> 0:10:28.360 McDonald's shouldn't get all the credit because the prototype, the 0:10:28.520 --> 0:10:33.319 predecessor of the McDonald's chicken nugget, was actually invented by 0:10:33.360 --> 0:10:37.920 a kind of tinkereer scientist in a basement laboratory at 0:10:37.960 --> 0:10:42.160 Cornell University, a guy named Robert Baker, who was not 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:47.000 primarily interested in chicken, but rather was interested in essentially 0:10:47.040 --> 0:10:51.080 how to avoid food waste. And he was very troubled 0:10:51.400 --> 0:10:55.080 by how much of the carcass of a chicken goes 0:10:55.120 --> 0:10:57.960 to waste, and he wanted to find ways to use 0:10:58.040 --> 0:11:00.840 as much of the carcass as possible, as much of 0:11:00.840 --> 0:11:04.240 the meat on the carcass as possible. And he came 0:11:04.320 --> 0:11:07.079 up in this basement laboratory with a bunch of graduate 0:11:07.120 --> 0:11:10.280 students with things that we now take for granted in 0:11:10.440 --> 0:11:15.920 supermarkets chicken, bacon, chicken cold cuts, chicken sausages. But his 0:11:16.720 --> 0:11:20.480 signature contribution to the future of chicken was a thing 0:11:20.520 --> 0:11:24.560 that he called the chicken stick, modeled some degree on 0:11:24.640 --> 0:11:27.520 fish sticks, which had been introduced about ten years earlier. 0:11:28.040 --> 0:11:33.320 The chicken stick was chopped, formed, pressed chicken meat sucked 0:11:33.360 --> 0:11:39.040 off the bones, covered with a breaded coating, frozen and 0:11:39.080 --> 0:11:40.839 frozen in such a way that when you took it 0:11:40.880 --> 0:11:43.760 out of the freezer and fried it or baked it, 0:11:44.280 --> 0:11:47.920 the coating wouldn't disassemble from the rest of the meat. 0:11:48.679 --> 0:11:53.120 That was a kind of secret process that Baker invented, 0:11:53.120 --> 0:11:56.280 but it didn't stay a secret. It was released in 0:11:56.320 --> 0:12:01.200 an agricultural extension bulletin that Cornell published and sent all 0:12:01.240 --> 0:12:04.000 over the country. They didn't in any way attempt to 0:12:04.080 --> 0:12:07.400 keep any ip in this, and as a result, the 0:12:07.440 --> 0:12:10.440 idea of something that looked like at chicken nugget was 0:12:10.520 --> 0:12:15.000 out there in the world, and seventeen years later out 0:12:15.040 --> 0:12:16.440 came the McDonald's snugget. 0:12:17.360 --> 0:12:20.040 Suddenly a lot more of a chicken could be used, 0:12:20.360 --> 0:12:23.720 and thanks to antibiotics and breeding, there was more chicken 0:12:23.760 --> 0:12:24.559 around to sell. 0:12:24.920 --> 0:12:27.120 One way to think about it is that raising chickens 0:12:27.160 --> 0:12:30.160 went from being a really small scale agriculture process to 0:12:30.200 --> 0:12:32.880 more of an industrial thing. There's a reason it's called 0:12:32.960 --> 0:12:35.880 factory farming, after all. The idea is to produce as 0:12:35.920 --> 0:12:38.000 much meat as you can at the lowest possible cost, 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:40.440 and then use it as efficiently as possible. And to 0:12:40.440 --> 0:12:43.480 do that you need standardization, new technology in the form 0:12:43.520 --> 0:12:45.440 of growth promoters and scale. 0:12:46.080 --> 0:12:48.800 I really think we can say that it's because of 0:12:48.840 --> 0:12:54.160 antibiotic use that we have the modern industrial scale meat 0:12:54.200 --> 0:12:58.319 production that we have today. Without that early use of 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:01.880 antibiotics as growth promoters, no one would have understood that 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:05.559 you could actually produce animals almost like widgets in a 0:13:05.640 --> 0:13:10.000 kind of Henry Ford model. And so once people moved 0:13:10.160 --> 0:13:13.240 to doing that, then it made sense for farms to 0:13:13.240 --> 0:13:16.760 get larger and for profit to increase. And for farms 0:13:16.760 --> 0:13:20.480 to get larger, you had to protect animals against being 0:13:20.520 --> 0:13:24.000 held in more crowded conditions than they traditionally would have 0:13:24.120 --> 0:13:27.280 been in smaller open farms. 0:13:27.720 --> 0:13:29.920 The upside of all of this is that we get 0:13:29.960 --> 0:13:33.240 plentiful white meat, all the stuff that goes into delicious 0:13:33.280 --> 0:13:37.160 sandwiches and convenient chicken nuggets. The downside is a lot 0:13:37.200 --> 0:13:39.920 of that comes at the expense of the animals themselves, 0:13:40.400 --> 0:13:43.400 and as we're about to see, also the farmers who 0:13:43.400 --> 0:13:54.080 grow them. There's another seminal moment in the transformation of 0:13:54.120 --> 0:13:57.280 America's chicken industry, one that has more to do with 0:13:57.440 --> 0:13:59.200 where they're grown and by whom. 0:14:00.040 --> 0:14:02.800 In nineteen twenty three, a Delaware housewife by the name 0:14:02.840 --> 0:14:06.920 of Cecil long Steel by the way, great name, got 0:14:06.920 --> 0:14:12.000 a surprise in the mail. She had ordered fifty baby chicks, 0:14:12.160 --> 0:14:14.520 but the mailman came to her door with five hundred 0:14:14.559 --> 0:14:15.280 chicks instead. 0:14:15.840 --> 0:14:18.800 Instead of sending the hundreds of extra chicks back in 0:14:18.840 --> 0:14:22.120 the mail, Cecil decided to make do. She kept them 0:14:22.120 --> 0:14:24.600 in a cardboard box and set about building a shed 0:14:24.640 --> 0:14:27.760 to house them. Over the next five months or so, 0:14:28.000 --> 0:14:30.880 she raised the chicks to adulthood, fattening them up and 0:14:30.920 --> 0:14:34.000 eventually selling them to local hotels and restaurants as a 0:14:34.040 --> 0:14:38.160 delicious meal. Then she decided to do it all over again. 0:14:38.640 --> 0:14:41.840 Soon she was ordering one thousand chicks, then ten thousand, 0:14:42.080 --> 0:14:43.320 and then she just kept going. 0:14:43.680 --> 0:14:46.480 So what Cecil pioneered is the first broiler house, a 0:14:46.480 --> 0:14:49.560 big step in the history of poultry farming. Today, chickens 0:14:49.560 --> 0:14:51.800 are raised in huge barns that cost large amounts of 0:14:51.840 --> 0:14:53.920 money to build, and in order to keep these big 0:14:53.960 --> 0:14:56.760 barns filled with chickens, farmers have to participate in something 0:14:56.840 --> 0:14:58.640 called the tournament system. 0:14:58.920 --> 0:15:01.960 In fact, everything about modern chicken is big. In the 0:15:02.000 --> 0:15:06.040 tournament system, farmers get baby chicks from large chicken breeders 0:15:06.240 --> 0:15:11.400 they're called integrators companies like Tyson, Purdue or Pilgrim's Pride, 0:15:11.680 --> 0:15:14.480 and then they raise them using feed and growth promoters 0:15:14.520 --> 0:15:17.960 sent to them by those same companies. Eventually, the mature 0:15:17.960 --> 0:15:20.880 birds are handed back to the chicken company that sold 0:15:20.920 --> 0:15:23.960 them as babies and they fulfill their chicken destiny of 0:15:24.000 --> 0:15:26.640 becoming sandwiches, nuggets, or other snacks. 0:15:27.320 --> 0:15:30.280 Basically, what we do is we supply the buildings and 0:15:30.320 --> 0:15:33.520 the labor and all the stuff needed to actually raise 0:15:33.600 --> 0:15:37.040 birds for these big what they call integrators or chicken 0:15:37.080 --> 0:15:40.800 companies like a Tyson or Purdue. Tyson or Purdue actually 0:15:40.880 --> 0:15:43.760 owns the chicks, and they actually own the feed and 0:15:44.200 --> 0:15:45.680 vaccinations and that sort of thing. 0:15:46.120 --> 0:15:49.920 Meet Craig Watts. He's a former contract poultry producer who 0:15:50.000 --> 0:15:53.680 raised chickens in North Carolina. As part of the tournament system. 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:57.120 We just basically get them on what lack of better terms, 0:15:57.160 --> 0:15:59.960 consignment there, there's just a few hours old. When we 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:04.000 get them and we raise them up to market age. 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:06.840 They give us some guidelines on doing that, and then 0:16:06.880 --> 0:16:09.240 they come pick them up, and then we get ready 0:16:09.240 --> 0:16:10.320 and start all over again. 0:16:10.680 --> 0:16:13.520 It all sounds pretty simple and efficient, and the integrators 0:16:13.560 --> 0:16:17.000 themselves argue that they're basically taking on the messier, more difficult, 0:16:17.080 --> 0:16:20.120 and more capital intensive parts of the chicken business, like 0:16:20.200 --> 0:16:23.360 hatching chicks, transporting them back and forth to farmers, and 0:16:23.400 --> 0:16:25.600 then processing them into chicken nuggets and so on. 0:16:25.960 --> 0:16:29.720 So that's the tournament system, but Craig Craig calls it 0:16:29.800 --> 0:16:30.520 something different. 0:16:30.880 --> 0:16:33.160 Basically, what it boils down to is who can get 0:16:33.200 --> 0:16:38.760 the chicken to the plant the quickest, Who can get 0:16:38.800 --> 0:16:41.880 that chicken the fattest on the least amount of feed 0:16:42.360 --> 0:16:45.400 least amount of feed meaning least amount of cost. So 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:49.360 and that sounds perfect. I mean, you figure things out, 0:16:49.440 --> 0:16:52.080 you grasp concepts, you tweet things, do what you have 0:16:52.160 --> 0:16:54.560 to do, and if you work smarter and you work 0:16:54.600 --> 0:16:57.040 harder than the next guy, you're gonna get compensated a 0:16:57.080 --> 0:16:58.960 little more perfect. 0:16:59.160 --> 0:16:59.400 Right. 0:17:00.080 --> 0:17:03.040 The problem is, there's the flaw in this whole tournament 0:17:03.120 --> 0:17:06.000 system scenario. I call it thunder doom. It's ten men 0:17:06.119 --> 0:17:09.080 enter and five men leave. Because every week, if you 0:17:09.160 --> 0:17:12.399 have ten growers go out, you're gonna have some that 0:17:12.480 --> 0:17:15.080 make at or above the base pay, which is my 0:17:15.119 --> 0:17:16.840 base pay, well I think was around five cents a 0:17:16.840 --> 0:17:19.000 pound at that time. Then you're going to have five 0:17:19.119 --> 0:17:21.600 or so out of the ten that are at base 0:17:21.760 --> 0:17:25.119 or below. Right, so they take the bonuses to the 0:17:25.400 --> 0:17:28.400 five growers that are above average, is taking the pay 0:17:28.440 --> 0:17:31.479 of the growers that are below average. So for the company, 0:17:31.480 --> 0:17:33.919 it's a zero sum game. They're only going to have 0:17:33.920 --> 0:17:36.600 a nickel invested in a pound. A pie, so to speak, 0:17:36.760 --> 0:17:40.000 is finite. The size of the pie is finite. The 0:17:40.000 --> 0:17:42.680 farmer is fighting for the slice. 0:17:43.000 --> 0:17:46.080 So in the tournament system, you're basically graded on a curve. 0:17:46.280 --> 0:17:48.520 If you're a chicken farmer who does well relative to 0:17:48.560 --> 0:17:50.800 other growers in the area, you'll get more money from 0:17:50.840 --> 0:17:52.800 the pot, and the ones who do badly you get 0:17:52.840 --> 0:17:54.879 less money from the same pot. So you want to 0:17:54.920 --> 0:17:56.800 be ranked higher relative to other growers. 0:17:57.359 --> 0:18:00.720 When Craig decided to become a farmer, heating against his 0:18:00.800 --> 0:18:03.960 fellow chicken growers for pay wasn't quite what he had 0:18:04.000 --> 0:18:07.920 in mind. In fact, let's go back to how Craig 0:18:08.040 --> 0:18:10.760 got into the chicken business in the first place, back 0:18:10.800 --> 0:18:14.280 when he saw a big opportunity when Purdue started building 0:18:14.320 --> 0:18:17.440 a processing plant just seven miles south of his home. 0:18:17.800 --> 0:18:19.919 They were looking for farmers to contract. We had to 0:18:19.920 --> 0:18:23.720 build buildings to raise their birds. I saw advertisement in 0:18:23.760 --> 0:18:26.399 the paper. I called the representative. We had a meeting. 0:18:27.119 --> 0:18:29.760 He gave me an income and expense kind of pro 0:18:29.840 --> 0:18:32.920 form a sheet. It wasn't get rich quick. I took 0:18:32.920 --> 0:18:35.720 it to my accountant. He cash floated there again. It 0:18:35.800 --> 0:18:37.960 was steady, but it wasn't get rich. But it was enough. 0:18:38.480 --> 0:18:41.840 And the guy at farm Credit was excited about the 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:44.440 possibility of poetry moving the entire area. He told me 0:18:44.480 --> 0:18:46.560 it was the best thing that might be the best 0:18:46.560 --> 0:18:48.359 thing that ever happened to farm in Robinson County. 0:18:48.359 --> 0:18:50.840 So there was Things went okay at first. Craig spent 0:18:50.880 --> 0:18:54.560 his days monitoring his birds, making sure they weren't overheating 0:18:54.760 --> 0:18:57.679 or getting sick, or eating too much or too little, 0:18:58.080 --> 0:19:01.800 basically following the instructions and the chicken growing rules sent 0:19:01.840 --> 0:19:02.440 by Perduit. 0:19:02.560 --> 0:19:05.040 Well, the first thing I would do, I would wake 0:19:05.160 --> 0:19:07.399 up and I would go and I would open all 0:19:07.400 --> 0:19:10.520 the houses up and I would just basically stick my 0:19:10.560 --> 0:19:12.280 head in the look and then I would and then 0:19:12.359 --> 0:19:15.320 we had a control room that the monitor things from, 0:19:15.800 --> 0:19:18.479 and I would make sure that the controller was set properly. 0:19:18.520 --> 0:19:21.320 They call it a computer, but it's basically a glorifly 0:19:21.480 --> 0:19:25.800 thermostat basically where you can control all the temperature settings, 0:19:25.920 --> 0:19:28.879 fan settings, that kind of stuff from a central location. 0:19:29.000 --> 0:19:30.320 So I would I would look at all that and 0:19:30.359 --> 0:19:33.000 make sure everything was right, you know, take a sniff test, 0:19:33.040 --> 0:19:35.240 you know, is ammonia up, is it good? You know? 0:19:35.520 --> 0:19:38.040 Is the house too humid? You know? And what did 0:19:38.040 --> 0:19:40.240 the birds look like? Are they spread out comfortable? Are 0:19:40.240 --> 0:19:42.560 they active or are they just huddled up? Or are 0:19:42.560 --> 0:19:44.520 they panting? I mean, it was just it was just 0:19:44.560 --> 0:19:47.760 a lot of observations. Initially I would have to run 0:19:47.760 --> 0:19:49.400 to kids to school, but then when i'd come back, 0:19:49.680 --> 0:19:51.880 the next thing I would do. I'd actually physically walk 0:19:51.920 --> 0:19:54.760 through the houses and I would look for birds that 0:19:54.800 --> 0:19:58.520 had died or maybe were deformed, or just maybe weren't 0:19:58.560 --> 0:20:01.040 performing as they should. Either I pick up the dead 0:20:01.560 --> 0:20:03.320 or we would have to call out and just just 0:20:03.359 --> 0:20:05.919 a nice word for kill birds that weren't going to 0:20:06.359 --> 0:20:09.240 make it the entire six weeks, you know, for whatever reason. 0:20:09.640 --> 0:20:11.359 But there was a limit to what Craig could do 0:20:11.400 --> 0:20:13.520 for his flock. After all, the integrators are the ones 0:20:13.600 --> 0:20:16.360 sending him the baby birds themselves. They owned the chickens, 0:20:16.400 --> 0:20:18.600 and they're the ones making decisions about what they eat, 0:20:18.840 --> 0:20:21.560 what medicines they get, what conditions they're kept in, and 0:20:21.600 --> 0:20:23.040 how much room they have to grow up in. 0:20:23.640 --> 0:20:26.280 The deal was is each of my houses were twenty 0:20:26.359 --> 0:20:30.159 thousand square feet. Well, they put thirty thousand birds in 0:20:30.240 --> 0:20:33.720 every house, so when those chickens were they had the 0:20:33.840 --> 0:20:35.960 same amount of space all the time. But when they 0:20:35.960 --> 0:20:38.959 got market age, I mean it was walled a wall 0:20:39.440 --> 0:20:42.399 in to end, just a sea of white chickens. So 0:20:42.560 --> 0:20:45.520 if you do the math, thirty thousand chickens and twenty 0:20:45.560 --> 0:20:49.200 thousand square feet is zero point sixty seven square foot 0:20:49.240 --> 0:20:52.760 per bird. So there's issues within the structure of the 0:20:52.800 --> 0:20:56.600 system that I had no control over that. It's not cruel, 0:20:57.480 --> 0:21:00.359 but it's not about quality of life for an animal 0:21:00.400 --> 0:21:02.920 by any means. It's about homogenizing a widget and getting 0:21:02.960 --> 0:21:05.960 it to the plant. These chickens traits have been selected 0:21:06.000 --> 0:21:08.639 over the years. The word that what they are. The 0:21:08.640 --> 0:21:11.679 Americans desire for white meat is what drove what we 0:21:11.760 --> 0:21:15.520 call the frankin chicken. The breast is very large, it's 0:21:15.680 --> 0:21:18.000 oversized compared the rest of his body. They do have 0:21:18.040 --> 0:21:22.520 trouble standing and they're very docile. They're not a hearty breed. 0:21:22.600 --> 0:21:25.920 I mean, they're bread to just barely stay alive long 0:21:26.040 --> 0:21:27.960 enough to get to the plant. So what they do 0:21:28.080 --> 0:21:29.520 is they take a bite of feed, they take a 0:21:29.600 --> 0:21:31.760 drink of water. They sit down. I called it three 0:21:31.800 --> 0:21:35.840 steps and flop boom, boom, boom boom, sit down. That's 0:21:35.840 --> 0:21:36.680 what they do all day. 0:21:37.560 --> 0:21:39.760 In two thousand and eight, Craig reached a tipping point 0:21:39.920 --> 0:21:43.080 frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chicken. 0:21:42.880 --> 0:21:44.640 Sentence say that ten times fast yo. 0:21:45.080 --> 0:21:49.280 Frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chickens, he 0:21:49.359 --> 0:21:52.640 filmed the conditions in his own chicken house and uploaded 0:21:52.640 --> 0:21:55.680 them to YouTube to send to his production manager at Purdue. 0:21:56.200 --> 0:21:59.200 Soon after, he partnered with a reporter and an animal 0:21:59.280 --> 0:22:02.119 rights activist produce an expose on chicken farming. 0:22:02.920 --> 0:22:06.080 Craig has no control over the health or genetics of 0:22:06.119 --> 0:22:11.879 the chicks that are delivered to him by Purdue. Bound 0:22:11.960 --> 0:22:15.160 by contract, Craig is not even allowed to give them 0:22:15.240 --> 0:22:21.160 sunshine or fresh air. Just thirty seven days later, they 0:22:21.200 --> 0:22:27.040 are a sea of panting birds. Panting indicates birds are overheated. 0:22:27.359 --> 0:22:30.120