Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: But besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of
Speaker 2: tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Here's an example
Speaker 2: of the progress that's been made already. Notice how breeding
Speaker 2: has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look
Speaker 2: at that drumstick. This bird was fattened in the same
Speaker 2: length of time and on the same amount of feed
Speaker 2: as the other one. Thank your own guess as to
Speaker 2: which is the more profitable to raise.
Speaker 3: For much of America's history, chickens look different to the
Speaker 3: way they do today. They were thin, elegant, even slim
Speaker 3: and upright. The average bird weighed about two and a
Speaker 3: half pounds in the nineteen twenties, and chickens were raised
Speaker 3: differently too, on small farms and homesteads. The birds and
Speaker 3: their eggs provided a valuable source of extra protein and
Speaker 3: the occasional Sunday roast for millions of Americans.
Speaker 4: But today chickens are front loaded feathered freaks. After years
Speaker 4: of commercial breeding, the weight of your run of the
Speaker 4: mill roaster has more than doubled to a chunky five
Speaker 4: or six pounds, way more than chickens of the past.
Speaker 1: Chickens as our great grandparents would have understood them looked
Speaker 1: very different from chickens today. They were scrawny, they were rangier,
Speaker 1: they could move around a barnyard, and they could flap
Speaker 1: up into trees and avoid predators. And that's almost nothing
Speaker 1: like the chickens that we eat today. So if you
Speaker 1: went back to the time of I guess our great grandparents,
Speaker 1: let's say, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people
Speaker 1: didn't eat chicken that and that seems very bizarre to
Speaker 1: us now in the era when there are a million
Speaker 1: forms of chicken nuggets in the cold case at the
Speaker 1: supermarket and there's a chicken sandwich on every corner. But
Speaker 1: chicken used to be kind of special.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the second installment of Beat Capitalism, our add
Speaker 3: thoughts special series in which we are examining the US
Speaker 3: economy through the lens of chicken. If you haven't listened
Speaker 3: to our first episode where we talked about chicken prices
Speaker 3: and the consumer experience of eating chickens and eggs, you
Speaker 3: should definitely go back and do that.
Speaker 4: In this episode, we're going to focus on the birds
Speaker 4: themselves and the people that grow them, because chicken actually
Speaker 4: has a lot to say about the structure of the
Speaker 4: labor market too, and the relationship between big companies and
Speaker 4: their workers. And a lot has changed from the backyard
Speaker 4: birds of yesteryear.
Speaker 3: To understand what's happened to chickens and the people who
Speaker 3: grow them, it helps to consider where they started from.
Speaker 3: Maren McKenna is a journalist and author who specializes in
Speaker 3: public health, and she wrote a book called appropriately Enough,
Speaker 3: Big Chicken.
Speaker 4: As we said, chickens used to be a lot. Smaller
Speaker 4: families might keep a few egg layers in their backyards,
Speaker 4: and once the birds reached the end of their laying life,
Speaker 4: they might be put in the proverbial pot. One key
Speaker 4: thing is that chicken meat, for a long time was
Speaker 4: a tree, not a stable.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: As a rule, older chickens that have been running around
Speaker 3: a backyard don't usually taste as good. They're leaner, they're chewier,
Speaker 3: and there just aren't that many of them compared to today's
Speaker 3: industrial scale farming. But things started to change in the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. To satisfy increased demand for
Speaker 3: chicken meat, farmers started scaling up and raising their birds
Speaker 3: in big chicken houses. We'll talk more about those in
Speaker 3: just a little bit.
Speaker 4: In the nineteen forties, after the Second World War, something
Speaker 4: big happen on the way to Big Chicken.
Speaker 1: To understand where the industrialization of chicken comes from, and
Speaker 1: after that the industrialization of almost all the other proteins
Speaker 1: that we eat, you really have to go back to
Speaker 1: the middle to the end of World War II, and
Speaker 1: a couple of things are happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: The first is that there's a war on and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of soldiers and sailors deployed around the globe
Speaker 1: who need to be fed, so there's a great deal
Speaker 1: of pressure on meat producers to increase their production. Pressure
Speaker 1: that goes away when the war is over, and when
Speaker 1: that guaranteed market from the military forces suddenly vanishes, leaving
Speaker 1: them pretty over extended. The second is that immediately after
Speaker 1: World War two, kind of extraordinarily, there are a number
Speaker 1: of extreme weather events in growing areas around the globe.
Speaker 1: There are typhoons, there are storms, and this is added
Speaker 1: to the destruction of growing areas that occurred during the
Speaker 1: war and the destruction of naval fleets and of fishing vessels.
Speaker 1: So there's both an over extension of meat production and
Speaker 1: also a sense of frigility of the food system.
Speaker 4: It was against this backdrop the biologist Thomas Jukes entered
Speaker 4: the picture. With more and more chickens now being kept
Speaker 4: in big houses, the birds were no longer able to
Speaker 4: forage for bugs and grubs and graints on their own.
Speaker 4: They needed help to survive indoors, and that's where Jukes
Speaker 4: comes in.
Speaker 1: Jukes was attached to a team that had produced the
Speaker 1: first antibiotic of the tetracyclines that we still use today.
Speaker 1: It was called oreomycin. He also happened to have been
Speaker 1: given an assignment to address the dietary needs of chickens
Speaker 1: because part of the issue of the meat industry feeling
Speaker 1: over extended after the end of World War II was
Speaker 1: that they felt they needed to cut costs. This is
Speaker 1: actually the point at which we start entering in to
Speaker 1: the part of American agricultural history where livestock starts getting
Speaker 1: fed a lot of grain, but there was concern that
Speaker 1: grain didn't have a full nutritional profile, and so they
Speaker 1: were looking for inexpensive supplements, and in a very famous experiment,
Speaker 1: Jukes bought a whole bunch of baby chicks, divided them
Speaker 1: into groups gave each group some kind of supplement that
Speaker 1: was available on the market at the time, cod liver oil,
Speaker 1: synthesized vitamins, brewers yeast. To one group, he gave the
Speaker 1: ground up dried remains of the growing medium in which
Speaker 1: his company's drug had been made, oreomycin, and when he
Speaker 1: assessed the results of the experiment on Christmas Day in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, he found that the chicks in his
Speaker 1: experiment who'd been given the oreomcein leftovers, had gained more
Speaker 1: weight than any other set of animals in the experiment,
Speaker 1: and from that recognition, an entire industry of giving an
Speaker 1: biotics to animals began. Jukes called that effect growth promotion,
Speaker 1: and they filed for a patent for the.
Speaker 3: So The introduction of growth promoters helped the birds survive
Speaker 3: the great indoors and get bigger. But that wasn't the
Speaker 3: last of the chicken revolution.
Speaker 1: One was that chickens themselves changed physically, thanks largely to
Speaker 1: the US Department of Agriculture, which in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: forties and early nineteen fifties sponsored a contest among chicken
Speaker 1: breeders called the Chicken of Tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Help in developing the Chicken of tomorrow. You can't take
Speaker 2: it regretted that every hand is earning her keeper. Even
Speaker 2: though laying an egg ought to be easy for any.
Speaker 1: Chicken, that's a few thing big twe.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: Anyhow, the idea of.
Speaker 1: The Chicken of Tomorrow contest was to make chickens meteor
Speaker 1: to produce a bird that would have more breast, that
Speaker 1: would have big enough to feed a family, which was
Speaker 1: kind of hard at that point for a four or
Speaker 1: five person family to eat one chicken and be satisfied,
Speaker 1: and also to be very predictable in a number of ways,
Speaker 1: to be a single breed. And after a couple of
Speaker 1: years of competition, the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest produced the
Speaker 1: prototype for the most of the chickens that are raised today.
Speaker 1: Blocky muscles, white feathered, docile, not interested in running around
Speaker 1: a barnyard and flapping up into a tree, content to
Speaker 1: sit in one place.
Speaker 4: So antibiotics and breeding helped turn the chicken of tomorrow
Speaker 4: into the chicken of today.
Speaker 3: Well that's not quite all. Actually, a lot of things
Speaker 3: were happening on the chicken innovation front around that time.
Speaker 1: The second thing that drove the difference between the Chicken
Speaker 1: of yesterday and the chicken of tomorrow is that we
Speaker 1: changed our orientation to how we eat chicken from buying
Speaker 1: birds that were whole and had to be roasted or
Speaker 1: cut up into pieces and had to be pan fried
Speaker 1: or broiled into a source of protein that was disassembled
Speaker 1: at the manufacturing level into things like nuggets, so that
Speaker 1: people could consume chicken without having to deal with the
Speaker 1: physical reality of a chicken.
Speaker 3: It's hard to imagine a world without chicken nuggets now,
Speaker 3: but as Marin lays out, it wasn't until the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties that these became a thing, and it was a
Speaker 3: very deliberate decision. After all, if you want to sell
Speaker 3: more chicken, you have to get people to eat more chicken,
Speaker 3: and one way of doing that is giving them more
Speaker 3: options to consume it. And then boom, the chicken nugget
Speaker 3: was born, and these little nuggets of chicken proved to
Speaker 3: be pure gold for some businesses like McDonald's McDonald's, Yes
Speaker 3: and Joe. You might be surprised to find out that
Speaker 3: McDonald's didn't actually invent the chick and nugget. Here's Marin again.
Speaker 1: So we all think of the chicken nugget as a
Speaker 1: creation of McDonald's, and certainly McDonald's would claim that the
Speaker 1: chicken nugget is their thing. Introduced in the late seventies,
Speaker 1: by nineteen eighty they were blowing the doors off in
Speaker 1: the McDonald's restaurants where they were sort of secretly introduced.
Speaker 1: But it's pretty widely understood in the poultry industry that
Speaker 1: McDonald's shouldn't get all the credit because the prototype, the
Speaker 1: predecessor of the McDonald's chicken nugget, was actually invented by
Speaker 1: a kind of tinkereer scientist in a basement laboratory at
Speaker 1: Cornell University, a guy named Robert Baker, who was not
Speaker 1: primarily interested in chicken, but rather was interested in essentially
Speaker 1: how to avoid food waste. And he was very troubled
Speaker 1: by how much of the carcass of a chicken goes
Speaker 1: to waste, and he wanted to find ways to use
Speaker 1: as much of the carcass as possible, as much of
Speaker 1: the meat on the carcass as possible. And he came
Speaker 1: up in this basement laboratory with a bunch of graduate
Speaker 1: students with things that we now take for granted in
Speaker 1: supermarkets chicken, bacon, chicken cold cuts, chicken sausages. But his
Speaker 1: signature contribution to the future of chicken was a thing
Speaker 1: that he called the chicken stick, modeled some degree on
Speaker 1: fish sticks, which had been introduced about ten years earlier.
Speaker 1: The chicken stick was chopped, formed, pressed chicken meat sucked
Speaker 1: off the bones, covered with a breaded coating, frozen and
Speaker 1: frozen in such a way that when you took it
Speaker 1: out of the freezer and fried it or baked it,
Speaker 1: the coating wouldn't disassemble from the rest of the meat.
Speaker 1: That was a kind of secret process that Baker invented,
Speaker 1: but it didn't stay a secret. It was released in
Speaker 1: an agricultural extension bulletin that Cornell published and sent all
Speaker 1: over the country. They didn't in any way attempt to
Speaker 1: keep any ip in this, and as a result, the
Speaker 1: idea of something that looked like at chicken nugget was
Speaker 1: out there in the world, and seventeen years later out
Speaker 1: came the McDonald's snugget.
Speaker 3: Suddenly a lot more of a chicken could be used,
Speaker 3: and thanks to antibiotics and breeding, there was more chicken
Speaker 3: around to sell.
Speaker 4: One way to think about it is that raising chickens
Speaker 4: went from being a really small scale agriculture process to
Speaker 4: more of an industrial thing. There's a reason it's called
Speaker 4: factory farming, after all. The idea is to produce as
Speaker 4: much meat as you can at the lowest possible cost,
Speaker 4: and then use it as efficiently as possible. And to
Speaker 4: do that you need standardization, new technology in the form
Speaker 4: of growth promoters and scale.
Speaker 1: I really think we can say that it's because of
Speaker 1: antibiotic use that we have the modern industrial scale meat
Speaker 1: production that we have today. Without that early use of
Speaker 1: antibiotics as growth promoters, no one would have understood that
Speaker 1: you could actually produce animals almost like widgets in a
Speaker 1: kind of Henry Ford model. And so once people moved
Speaker 1: to doing that, then it made sense for farms to
Speaker 1: get larger and for profit to increase. And for farms
Speaker 1: to get larger, you had to protect animals against being
Speaker 1: held in more crowded conditions than they traditionally would have
Speaker 1: been in smaller open farms.
Speaker 3: The upside of all of this is that we get
Speaker 3: plentiful white meat, all the stuff that goes into delicious
Speaker 3: sandwiches and convenient chicken nuggets. The downside is a lot
Speaker 3: of that comes at the expense of the animals themselves,
Speaker 3: and as we're about to see, also the farmers who
Speaker 3: grow them. There's another seminal moment in the transformation of
Speaker 3: America's chicken industry, one that has more to do with
Speaker 3: where they're grown and by whom.
Speaker 4: In nineteen twenty three, a Delaware housewife by the name
Speaker 4: of Cecil long Steel by the way, great name, got
Speaker 4: a surprise in the mail. She had ordered fifty baby chicks,
Speaker 4: but the mailman came to her door with five hundred
Speaker 4: chicks instead.
Speaker 3: Instead of sending the hundreds of extra chicks back in
Speaker 3: the mail, Cecil decided to make do. She kept them
Speaker 3: in a cardboard box and set about building a shed
Speaker 3: to house them. Over the next five months or so,
Speaker 3: she raised the chicks to adulthood, fattening them up and
Speaker 3: eventually selling them to local hotels and restaurants as a
Speaker 3: delicious meal. Then she decided to do it all over again.
Speaker 3: Soon she was ordering one thousand chicks, then ten thousand,
Speaker 3: and then she just kept going.
Speaker 4: So what Cecil pioneered is the first broiler house, a
Speaker 4: big step in the history of poultry farming. Today, chickens
Speaker 4: are raised in huge barns that cost large amounts of
Speaker 4: money to build, and in order to keep these big
Speaker 4: barns filled with chickens, farmers have to participate in something
Speaker 4: called the tournament system.
Speaker 3: In fact, everything about modern chicken is big. In the
Speaker 3: tournament system, farmers get baby chicks from large chicken breeders
Speaker 3: they're called integrators companies like Tyson, Purdue or Pilgrim's Pride,
Speaker 3: and then they raise them using feed and growth promoters
Speaker 3: sent to them by those same companies. Eventually, the mature
Speaker 3: birds are handed back to the chicken company that sold
Speaker 3: them as babies and they fulfill their chicken destiny of
Speaker 3: becoming sandwiches, nuggets, or other snacks.
Speaker 6: Basically, what we do is we supply the buildings and
Speaker 6: the labor and all the stuff needed to actually raise
Speaker 6: birds for these big what they call integrators or chicken
Speaker 6: companies like a Tyson or Purdue. Tyson or Purdue actually
Speaker 6: owns the chicks, and they actually own the feed and
Speaker 6: vaccinations and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Meet Craig Watts. He's a former contract poultry producer who
Speaker 3: raised chickens in North Carolina. As part of the tournament system.
Speaker 6: We just basically get them on what lack of better terms,
Speaker 6: consignment there, there's just a few hours old. When we
Speaker 6: get them and we raise them up to market age.
Speaker 6: They give us some guidelines on doing that, and then
Speaker 6: they come pick them up, and then we get ready
Speaker 6: and start all over again.
Speaker 4: It all sounds pretty simple and efficient, and the integrators
Speaker 4: themselves argue that they're basically taking on the messier, more difficult,
Speaker 4: and more capital intensive parts of the chicken business, like
Speaker 4: hatching chicks, transporting them back and forth to farmers, and
Speaker 4: then processing them into chicken nuggets and so on.
Speaker 3: So that's the tournament system, but Craig Craig calls it
Speaker 3: something different.
Speaker 6: Basically, what it boils down to is who can get
Speaker 6: the chicken to the plant the quickest, Who can get
Speaker 6: that chicken the fattest on the least amount of feed
Speaker 6: least amount of feed meaning least amount of cost. So
Speaker 6: and that sounds perfect. I mean, you figure things out,
Speaker 6: you grasp concepts, you tweet things, do what you have
Speaker 6: to do, and if you work smarter and you work
Speaker 6: harder than the next guy, you're gonna get compensated a
Speaker 6: little more perfect.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: The problem is, there's the flaw in this whole tournament
Speaker 6: system scenario. I call it thunder doom. It's ten men
Speaker 6: enter and five men leave. Because every week, if you
Speaker 6: have ten growers go out, you're gonna have some that
Speaker 6: make at or above the base pay, which is my
Speaker 6: base pay, well I think was around five cents a
Speaker 6: pound at that time. Then you're going to have five
Speaker 6: or so out of the ten that are at base
Speaker 6: or below. Right, so they take the bonuses to the
Speaker 6: five growers that are above average, is taking the pay
Speaker 6: of the growers that are below average. So for the company,
Speaker 6: it's a zero sum game. They're only going to have
Speaker 6: a nickel invested in a pound. A pie, so to speak,
Speaker 6: is finite. The size of the pie is finite. The
Speaker 6: farmer is fighting for the slice.
Speaker 4: So in the tournament system, you're basically graded on a curve.
Speaker 4: If you're a chicken farmer who does well relative to
Speaker 4: other growers in the area, you'll get more money from
Speaker 4: the pot, and the ones who do badly you get
Speaker 4: less money from the same pot. So you want to
Speaker 4: be ranked higher relative to other growers.
Speaker 3: When Craig decided to become a farmer, heating against his
Speaker 3: fellow chicken growers for pay wasn't quite what he had
Speaker 3: in mind. In fact, let's go back to how Craig
Speaker 3: got into the chicken business in the first place, back
Speaker 3: when he saw a big opportunity when Purdue started building
Speaker 3: a processing plant just seven miles south of his home.
Speaker 6: They were looking for farmers to contract. We had to
Speaker 6: build buildings to raise their birds. I saw advertisement in
Speaker 6: the paper. I called the representative. We had a meeting.
Speaker 6: He gave me an income and expense kind of pro
Speaker 6: form a sheet. It wasn't get rich quick. I took
Speaker 6: it to my accountant. He cash floated there again. It
Speaker 6: was steady, but it wasn't get rich. But it was enough.
Speaker 6: And the guy at farm Credit was excited about the
Speaker 6: possibility of poetry moving the entire area. He told me
Speaker 6: it was the best thing that might be the best
Speaker 6: thing that ever happened to farm in Robinson County.
Speaker 3: So there was Things went okay at first. Craig spent
Speaker 3: his days monitoring his birds, making sure they weren't overheating
Speaker 3: or getting sick, or eating too much or too little,
Speaker 3: basically following the instructions and the chicken growing rules sent
Speaker 3: by Perduit.
Speaker 6: Well, the first thing I would do, I would wake
Speaker 6: up and I would go and I would open all
Speaker 6: the houses up and I would just basically stick my
Speaker 6: head in the look and then I would and then
Speaker 6: we had a control room that the monitor things from,
Speaker 6: and I would make sure that the controller was set properly.
Speaker 6: They call it a computer, but it's basically a glorifly
Speaker 6: thermostat basically where you can control all the temperature settings,
Speaker 6: fan settings, that kind of stuff from a central location.
Speaker 6: So I would I would look at all that and
Speaker 6: make sure everything was right, you know, take a sniff test,
Speaker 6: you know, is ammonia up, is it good? You know?
Speaker 6: Is the house too humid? You know? And what did
Speaker 6: the birds look like? Are they spread out comfortable? Are
Speaker 6: they active or are they just huddled up? Or are
Speaker 6: they panting? I mean, it was just it was just
Speaker 6: a lot of observations. Initially I would have to run
Speaker 6: to kids to school, but then when i'd come back,
Speaker 6: the next thing I would do. I'd actually physically walk
Speaker 6: through the houses and I would look for birds that
Speaker 6: had died or maybe were deformed, or just maybe weren't
Speaker 6: performing as they should. Either I pick up the dead
Speaker 6: or we would have to call out and just just
Speaker 6: a nice word for kill birds that weren't going to
Speaker 6: make it the entire six weeks, you know, for whatever reason.
Speaker 4: But there was a limit to what Craig could do
Speaker 4: for his flock. After all, the integrators are the ones
Speaker 4: sending him the baby birds themselves. They owned the chickens,
Speaker 4: and they're the ones making decisions about what they eat,
Speaker 4: what medicines they get, what conditions they're kept in, and
Speaker 4: how much room they have to grow up in.
Speaker 6: The deal was is each of my houses were twenty
Speaker 6: thousand square feet. Well, they put thirty thousand birds in
Speaker 6: every house, so when those chickens were they had the
Speaker 6: same amount of space all the time. But when they
Speaker 6: got market age, I mean it was walled a wall
Speaker 6: in to end, just a sea of white chickens. So
Speaker 6: if you do the math, thirty thousand chickens and twenty
Speaker 6: thousand square feet is zero point sixty seven square foot
Speaker 6: per bird. So there's issues within the structure of the
Speaker 6: system that I had no control over that. It's not cruel,
Speaker 6: but it's not about quality of life for an animal
Speaker 6: by any means. It's about homogenizing a widget and getting
Speaker 6: it to the plant. These chickens traits have been selected
Speaker 6: over the years. The word that what they are. The
Speaker 6: Americans desire for white meat is what drove what we
Speaker 6: call the frankin chicken. The breast is very large, it's
Speaker 6: oversized compared the rest of his body. They do have
Speaker 6: trouble standing and they're very docile. They're not a hearty breed.
Speaker 6: I mean, they're bread to just barely stay alive long
Speaker 6: enough to get to the plant. So what they do
Speaker 6: is they take a bite of feed, they take a
Speaker 6: drink of water. They sit down. I called it three
Speaker 6: steps and flop boom, boom, boom boom, sit down. That's
Speaker 6: what they do all day.
Speaker 4: In two thousand and eight, Craig reached a tipping point
Speaker 4: frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chicken.
Speaker 3: Sentence say that ten times fast yo.
Speaker 4: Frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chickens, he
Speaker 4: filmed the conditions in his own chicken house and uploaded
Speaker 4: them to YouTube to send to his production manager at Purdue.
Speaker 4: Soon after, he partnered with a reporter and an animal
Speaker 4: rights activist produce an expose on chicken farming.
Speaker 7: Craig has no control over the health or genetics of
Speaker 7: the chicks that are delivered to him by Purdue. Bound
Speaker 7: by contract, Craig is not even allowed to give them
Speaker 7: sunshine or fresh air. Just thirty seven days later, they
Speaker 7: are a sea of panting birds. Panting indicates birds are overheated.
Speaker 7: These birds find it too painful to bear the weight
Speaker 7: of their unnaturally large breasts on their legs.
Speaker 3: Craig Watts ultimately prove to be something of a renegade.
Speaker 4: For its part, a Produced spokeswoman said it works with
Speaker 4: over eighteen hundred poultry farmers and the retention rate with
Speaker 4: those contracts is around ninety eight percent. In a statement
Speaker 4: to odd Lats, they also said it's been nearly ten
Speaker 4: years since Watts was a farmer for Purdue, and in
Speaker 4: that time it has established farmer advisory councils to gather
Speaker 4: important feedback and insights from them on how the company
Speaker 4: can improve.
Speaker 3: But Craig's complaints about the imbalance of power in the
Speaker 3: poultry industry and the health of the birds are things
Speaker 3: that come up again and again in our conversations with
Speaker 3: chicken farmers. For instance, Karen Crutchfield, she goes by Susie,
Speaker 3: was a contract grower for Tyson for many years, but
Speaker 3: she started out raising cows.
Speaker 8: We already had a cattle farm, and so we wanted
Speaker 8: to kind of expand out and add something else, some
Speaker 8: more income coming in. The difference in farming cattle and
Speaker 8: farming chickens is farming cattle, you own all the inputs.
Speaker 8: You own, the cattle get you on the feed. You
Speaker 8: decide what type of cattle you're going to buy. You
Speaker 8: decide what time they leave your farm, You decide the
Speaker 8: breeding periods. All of it is decided, but you and
Speaker 8: you are a truly independent cattle farmer. You're independent. You
Speaker 8: don't have nobody giving you orders or telling you what
Speaker 8: you need, what size, what kind of feed. With chickens,
Speaker 8: it's totally different. With chickens. You have no control over
Speaker 8: any of the inputs. They deliver the chickens at third time,
Speaker 8: they give them the feed that they want them to have,
Speaker 8: They pick them up on their time. They tell you
Speaker 8: what to do in controlling the inputs in the house,
Speaker 8: what temperature it needs to be, what size you need
Speaker 8: to let them out into full house. They control all
Speaker 8: of the inputs. You were only a serf more or less.
Speaker 8: You just have to do what they tell you. And
Speaker 8: actually it's more like your employee of theirs.
Speaker 3: So for Susie, following the instructions of the chicken integrator
Speaker 3: was a must because if you don't, you risk losing
Speaker 3: out on that contract and you might not have any
Speaker 3: other companies to sell chickens too.
Speaker 8: For poltry goers, there is no option of going independent
Speaker 8: because there's nothing you can do with your barns except
Speaker 8: raised chickens for Tyson or whatever integrator as the occasion
Speaker 8: had to be. In my area, Tyson was the only
Speaker 8: company in the area that we could go to. So
Speaker 8: if your houses was shut down, they were just shut down.
Speaker 8: You had nowhere else to go or anything else you
Speaker 8: could do with your barns other than maybe put hay
Speaker 8: in them. That was the only option you had. You
Speaker 8: could not grow chickens in them.
Speaker 4: Again, the barns are really expensive and the farmers are
Speaker 4: often on their own when it comes to building them,
Speaker 4: even though the integrators may be the ones asking for improvements,
Speaker 4: which is exactly what happened to Susie.
Speaker 8: Tyson Food started doing upgrades probably in the mid nineties,
Speaker 8: and each time they decided to do an upgrade, it
Speaker 8: kept costing more money. It was bigger upgrades than before,
Speaker 8: and so the last upgrade that they called for us
Speaker 8: to do was in twenty ten. They sent a letter
Speaker 8: out saying that we had to do all of these upgrades.
Speaker 8: One of the upgrades that they requested us to do
Speaker 8: at the time was add two extra royal lights, just
Speaker 8: one massive upgrade, and it was going to end up
Speaker 8: costing us over three hundred thousand dollars to upgrade, and
Speaker 8: that would actually cost on the two older houses that
Speaker 8: were built in eighty seven, it was going to cost
Speaker 8: us more than we had originally built the houses for
Speaker 8: them for. And so at that point we said, no,
Speaker 8: we're not going to do any more upgrades. The incentive
Speaker 8: for Tyson to ask for upgrades is keep the grower
Speaker 8: in debt. As long as the grower's in debt, they're
Speaker 8: going to do exactly what Tyson tells them. If they
Speaker 8: get out of debt, then they have more freedom to
Speaker 8: say no, I don't want to do that, and I'm
Speaker 8: not going to do that. And if they catch you off,
Speaker 8: then you've got everything paid for. But if you're a
Speaker 8: million dollars in debt and going to lose your home,
Speaker 8: you're more likely to do what they say.
Speaker 4: A Tyson spokesperson did respond for comment. When we reached out,
Speaker 4: they said, and I quote, Foods contracts with a network
Speaker 4: of thousands of independent growers across the country, and we
Speaker 4: value the contributions that these growers make to our business.
Speaker 4: We depend on growers, and the contracts we have in
Speaker 4: place incentivized growers to raise high quality birds.
Speaker 3: One contract grower who did lose it all is Michael Diaz.
Speaker 3: The Diasas used their life savings to put down a
Speaker 3: deposit on fifty acres of land back in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: with a home and four chicken houses. It was supposed
Speaker 3: to be agricultural bliss.
Speaker 5: Farming was something that I had always dreamed of doing,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't something that I saw as being very
Speaker 5: feasible to do given the monetary constraints. I mean, you
Speaker 5: need a large piece of property. You needed to make
Speaker 5: a lot of capital investments to get into any kind
Speaker 5: of farming. The magnitude of what we had bought didn't
Speaker 5: sink in. But there were other farmers in the area.
Speaker 5: They weren't poultry farmers, but some of them knew of
Speaker 5: some poultry farms. They were friends with some of these guys,
Speaker 5: and there was always this kind of this thought process
Speaker 5: that these guys that own these poultry farms that you know,
Speaker 5: these barns are fifty by five hundred feet long, and
Speaker 5: some of them bigger than that. You know, you always
Speaker 5: felt like they were because they had a lot of
Speaker 5: capital investments. You thought they must have had good cash flow,
Speaker 5: they must have been living good lives. They were in
Speaker 5: contract with some of these household brands that you see
Speaker 5: on every grocery store shelf that you tend to start trusting,
Speaker 5: right you see these names. You know, I'll pick on others.
Speaker 5: You know, you see a name like Heinz Ketchup, or
Speaker 5: you see a name like Hormel or whatever. What I'm
Speaker 5: trying to allude to is you see these brands that
Speaker 5: have been in your face year after year from childhood
Speaker 5: to adulthood, a staple in our food system. Say you
Speaker 5: tend to trust these brands or doing the right thing.
Speaker 4: But Michael's integrator kept asking for more investments, and he
Speaker 4: struggled to keep up on this loan payment. Michael thinks
Speaker 4: he spent something like one hundred thousand dollars on unexpected
Speaker 4: upgrades in just two years.
Speaker 5: I kept thinking that this is just going to sink
Speaker 5: me deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into debt.
Speaker 5: This dream of me being able to pay this place
Speaker 5: off and eventually build something that's generational for my family
Speaker 5: is not going to exist, and I said, I'm not
Speaker 5: doing it.
Speaker 3: Michael Diaz ended up selling the farm, losing his life
Speaker 3: savings in the process. He later sued his integrator, arguing
Speaker 3: that chicken farmers in the tournament system should be classified
Speaker 3: as employees of integrators instead of independent contractors. That litigation
Speaker 3: is still pending.
Speaker 4: Susie Crutchfield filed for bankruptcy and is still paying off
Speaker 4: her debt. Interestingly, Craig Watts didn't lose his chicken farming
Speaker 4: contract with Purdue after filming his barns, but the relationship
Speaker 4: obviously soured. Craig filed a whistleblower complaint Purdue countersuit that's
Speaker 4: pending too.
Speaker 3: All three of them are now part of the Socially
Speaker 3: Responsible Agriculture Project SRAP, where they work on a contract
Speaker 3: Grower Transition program, which aims to help poultry farmers navigate
Speaker 3: the thunderdome and the pile of manure, both figurative and literal,
Speaker 3: that comes with it. Here's Michael Diez again.
Speaker 5: The person that has all the risk, all the liability
Speaker 5: is the farmer. He's the one that's in debt for
Speaker 5: these barns. He's the one that's in debt for all
Speaker 5: the facilities, the upgrades, the equipment. He's the one that's
Speaker 5: in debt that he's got to figure out, what in
Speaker 5: the world do I do with all this manure that
Speaker 5: I have here on this on this site. I've got
Speaker 5: to get rid of at half of them have nothing
Speaker 5: that they can do with it. Everything that is that
Speaker 5: is a liability the farmer has. The integrator is the
Speaker 5: only one that's got anything that's able to build a profit.
Speaker 3: That is not the sound of chickens, clearly, but I
Speaker 3: promise it will be relevant in a second contract growers
Speaker 3: in the poultry world carry most of the potential downside
Speaker 3: risks of chicken farming, while big chicken the integrators, enjoy
Speaker 3: most of the upside. They hog the benefits and pass
Speaker 3: on the risks, and that model is becoming more common,
Speaker 3: as the state of pig farming in Iowa shows.
Speaker 4: At any given time, there are some twenty eight million
Speaker 4: hogs being raised in Iowa, making it America's biggest pig
Speaker 4: farming state, Iowa now produces nearly a third of America's
Speaker 4: total hog supply.
Speaker 3: And speaking of manure, Iowa's pig population and what it
Speaker 3: produces has become a big debate. People generally don't want
Speaker 3: to live next to big pig farms for obvious reasons,
Speaker 3: and huge lagoons of manure can get into the water supply.
Speaker 3: One analysis of USDA data shows that the manure produced
Speaker 3: by Iowa's pigs has grown by almost eighty percent between
Speaker 3: twenty two and twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Austin Ferk is also a member of the SRAP. He's
Speaker 4: an agricultural Ana Trust expert who grew up in Iowa
Speaker 4: had a front row seat to the state's transformation to
Speaker 4: prime pig territory.
Speaker 3: As Austin points out, Iowa's pork industry didn't always look
Speaker 3: like this. Modern pig producers took a lot of inspiration
Speaker 3: from you guessed it, chickens.
Speaker 9: What you saw happened in the eighties is a state
Speaker 9: senator deregulated the pork industry in North Carolina to allow
Speaker 9: the industrialization of pork production, copying that model chickenization, where
Speaker 9: he owned the animal. He had other people and these
Speaker 9: metal sheds. You'd give them his pigs, they would grow
Speaker 9: them out, and then he would sell them, butcher them,
Speaker 9: what have you. The business elite in Iowa saw what
Speaker 9: was happening in North Carolina and they saw the massive
Speaker 9: production increase is going on there, and they were like,
Speaker 9: we're not going to lose our number one status. We're
Speaker 9: going to gauge in this race to the bottom.
Speaker 4: And actually there's a name for this trend, chickenization.
Speaker 9: We are going to chickenize the pork industry in Iowa,
Speaker 9: and if we have to kill the family farm, so
Speaker 9: be it, because it's all about selling more quarancy the
Speaker 9: whole supply chain around it, maintaining that dominance instead of
Speaker 9: having chicken behave like the other industries. It became a
Speaker 9: race to the bottom chickenization. Everything is being chickenized, where
Speaker 9: you just apply this really abusive power structure to different
Speaker 9: modes of commodity production because it shifts the riskiest part
Speaker 9: to the worker and the corporate shareholders get the upside
Speaker 9: of it.
Speaker 3: And that's arguably helped big Chicken just get bigger. Chicken
Speaker 3: is now dominated by large commercial breeders and processors. With
Speaker 3: a handful of companies commanding sixty percent of the US
Speaker 3: chicken market, the.
Speaker 9: Chicken industry is pretty concentrated. It's not even just the
Speaker 9: concentrate of slaughtering the animal, it's the whole supply chain.
Speaker 9: The whole goal of the company is from the genetics
Speaker 9: of the thing that hatches to the chicken tenders eating
Speaker 9: the store. That whole thing has been highly vertically integrated.
Speaker 3: So chickens have grown fatter, more horizontal. At the same time,
Speaker 3: the chicken industry as a whole has become more concentrated,
Speaker 3: more top down, more vertical, more powerful in terms of
Speaker 3: what they can extract from farmers and their birds. And
Speaker 3: that business model is spreading across agriculture and even beyond.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: You know, people think of companies like Uber as pioneering
Speaker 4: some novel business model, but the rise of independent contractors
Speaker 4: with more risk being foisted on people who resemble employees
Speaker 4: is a large and growing phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Next up on beat capitalism, what can be done to
Speaker 3: tip the balance of power back towards consumers and workers.
Speaker 3: It's time to talk about unclucking the system.
Speaker 4: Beat Capitalism is written by Tracy Alloway, Carmen Rodriguez and
Speaker 4: Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 3: This short series was produced and edited by Carmen with
Speaker 3: the help of Kale Brooks and Dashel Bennett.
Speaker 4: The fact checking of industry puns and other information was
Speaker 4: brought to you by Dash and Kale.
Speaker 3: The chickenization of our regular All Blocks theme song and
Speaker 3: the mixing is done by our sound engineer, Blake Maples.
Speaker 4: Brendan Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is
Speaker 4: Bloomberg's Head of Podcasts.
Speaker 3: Special thanks to Compassion.
Speaker 4: In World Farming and if you enjoyed this deep dive
Speaker 4: into the chicken industry, please consider leaving a positive review
Speaker 4: on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3: This episode has been updated to reflect a clarification. It
Speaker 3: wasn't until twenty thirteen that Craig Watts sent a film
Speaker 3: of his barnes to his production manager. In twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: he partnered with a human rights activist and journalist to
Speaker 3: produce a documentary on chicken farm um