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 of the last century. Like others who have studied modern-day agriculture, I suggest that an agro-industrial imperative pushed these concepts from a natural to a technological foundation. In the setting of the factory farm, the question is whether the broiler is even a bird any longer. The manufacturers want to have it sautéed both ways – as a chicken to feed us, but also as an industrial object to be regulated like an automobile, put together from various parts, and yet without what they see as onerous regulations, because this is only a bird.
The rapid industrial transformation of the chicken from an animal well adapted to its natural worlds – from Southeast Asia to the Savannah of Africa, from the backyard farms of the plains states to the peasant farms of nineteenth-century Europe and Asia – to an industrial object to serve entirely as meat or egg layer is the focus of chapter 3, where, drawing on an eighteenth-century French doctor and philosophe, I call the broiler a “machine” and identify its many parts, and the increasing use of a variety of genetic, chemical, electrical and other inputs that, being employed more and more from the second half of the twentieth century, completed the transformation of the chicken from a barnyard animal to a factory farmyard animal. In this chapter, we also examine the growing use of antibiotics and other such chemicals, the role of regulation and inspection in avian-industrial safety, and the growing scourge of foodborne illnesses and pandemics.
Chapter 4 explores thematically the kinds of environmental problems that arise with factory farming – in this case, with broiler production. There’s a lot of shit to be tabulated and estimated and weighed, and a lot of other pollution as well: methane, run-off, heavy metals, antibiotics, land use and the like. Rather than provide that tabulation, however, I offer discussion of how factory farms have evolved to be such environmentally
