seek to make and patent them and their feeds. They include hunters, trappers and furriers with the rise of commercial interests and overexploitation; not only farmers, but breeders, scientists, and researchers. They are local people and consumers at supermarkets. They are connected to granges and cooperatives and extension services.”34
Several scholars note how the production of livestock is no different from the production of many other products, within and outside of the agricultural world – for example, automobiles – with specially designed buildings to maximize controlled space, minimize input and significantly increase output. For livestock, special buildings, barns and outbuildings, motors and conveyors have entered agribusiness. The products include chickens, pigs, cattle – both dairy and beef – and so on. As Susan McMurry notes, their industrial production both benefits from advances in public health and becomes entrapped by them. For example, advances in bacteriology changed dairy production, with government sanitation officials pushing regulations to ensure safe milk production as it was transported from the countryside to the city, and with rising milk consumption as a substitute for human breast milk. Perhaps pasteurization, bottling and cooling to standards was the only possible outcome. She notes that barns, trucks, highways, local plants “entered the mix of places where bacteria might grow in milk.” For the barn, McMurry writes, “metal ventilators sprouted from the roof ridge; milk houses appeared; hog houses were demolished or moved; poultry houses were relocated; new privies were built; water systems were installed (at least at the barn and the milk house); and new horse stables were built.” Eventually, human handling was reduced to a minimum,35 as it has been in the case of broilers. Indeed, chicken meat production reflects all of these tendencies. Even the architectures of chicken production reflect the considerations of maximum efficient use of space and reliance on modern inputs of food and drugs to make those spaces work optimally. In many places below, the reader will have the opportunity to consider the way in which technological advances seem to impel the factory farm onward – what I refer to as a technological imperative that suggests a determinist argument.
Broiler production of similar chicken units is essentially no different from the production of monocultures of various other plants – bananas, coffee, rubber and so on. These living things are based on the drive for manageable units of output based on industrial understandings, and the belief among promoters that they can prevail over climate, seasons, terrain – whatever the physical, geophysical or biological problem. As Richard Tucker demonstrated, the American economic strength in Central and South America, the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim had significant impacts on local environments and people through colonial, plantation and post-colonial production of sugar, fruit, coffee, rubber, cattle and timber. American business interests, with the help of government, sought to establish monocultures of bananas, rubber and other commodities, using slaves or indentured labor, armed with dangerous chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers that eventually polluted water and soil, and also antibiotics. He notes how financial interests pushed the creation of these monocultures.36 Investment went into production and extraction, not the development of civilian infrastructure – roads, hospitals, stores and schools. Often with the assistance of local and national officials, they have pushed the monocultures with the promise of local benefits, and yet the local people suffer the burdens of production, social disruption and environmental change.37 In the modern chicken industry, similarly, and around the globe, local producers – contract laborers – and their families work in difficult conditions for low wages, while big businesses far away reap the harvests and push the costs of environmental and social disruption onto those laborers and their communities.
Some people have written about the industrialization of agriculture as natural and expected, if from a technologically determinist and nearly utopian perspective, ignoring the costs and consequences, and suggesting that local communities will always adjust. Hiram Drache, a historian of agriculture, writing in the 1970s, insisted that largeracreage farms were the most efficient and modern of American farms, while noting that family farms, the mythical foundation of American republicanism, would survive the onslaught of technological change. By efficient, he meant by such measures as acres harvested per machine, yield per acre, and yield per animal. He did point out an important fact: far from being a product of capitalism alone, government programs were central in stimulating the growth of large-scale agriculture,38 as they had been directly and indirectly through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Powerful machines – greater horsepower – enabled one farmer to do the work with fewer hours of hired labor per season, while comfort at the controls – two-way radio, air conditioning, a smooth ride – enabled expansion of farms to the horizon. Drache argumentatively suggested that government programs of “a non-price support nature, such as Occupational Safety and Health standards, environmental regulations, and social and labor legislation” were inappropriate, for they would discourage the small-farm operator from staying in the business as too expensive.39
Yet Drache found it possible to conclude that, even if large-scale practices were advantageous for all meat-animal industries, the farms of the twenty-first century would still be family-oriented units.40 On this level alone, Drache ignored the fact that massive farms armed with industrial tools, lax regulation, and government subsidies do not constitute “family farms.” He optimistically noted that the social implications of the tying of industry to agriculture would be substantial, but insisted that “people will adjust and the end result will be a better life style.” He tried to suggest that people who protest against this situation are Luddites of some sort, like those who railed against the Industrial Revolution where all turned out for the better.41
Yet the family farm has for a long time not been a dominant political and economic feature of US agriculture, nor of that in many European countries, although the myth of these family farms persists, and, wherever CAFOs appear, the smaller producers seem to suffer.42 Indeed, family farms are physically smaller, have lower average income, an increasingly small share of overall production, and receive fewer benefits and subsidies than larger farms, including those privately owned or run by absentee owners and corporations. In fact, the top ten “farmers” in the US in 2018 receiving subsidies were corporations with an average annual subsidy of $18 million each.43 In Europe, the same “myth” of family farms as being somehow, by the twenty-first century, stable economic and social 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
