to the southern states beginning from the 1930s. In 1910, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa – mostly Midwestern states – were the major income producers from poultry, finishing with California in tenth place in income, while there were four New England states in the top ten in relative rank with reference to average farm income from poultry, with eggs the leading income producer. In terms of the number of poultry, the Midwestern states again dominated, with Iowa and its 23.5 million in first place.6 Signs of centralized control of production that would characterize the industry from Brazil to China to India had already appeared, with transport innovations providing impetus – shipping in refrigerated and open train wagons to urban markets made this possible.7 But, as yet, there was no indication of the rapidly coming consolidation, centralization and vertical integration of future years.
Stimulated by producers in the 1930s who saw cost-cutting possibilities in Fordist vertical integration, assisted by growing demand for chicken meat during World War II to bridge pork and beef meat shortages, and enabled by inattentive government regulation in the post-war years, the CAFO burst forth in the US in the 1960s and spread across the globe, beginning in the 1980s. In some countries, CAFOs are the major source of peoples’ meat. Intensive animal production commenced in highly mechanized swine slaughterhouses, and in the chicken industry in several regions simultaneously, including Georgia and the south and Delmarva. Increasingly inexpensive feed (grain) and the growth of the transport industry also stimulated the industry.8 Between 1950 and the twenty-first century, broiler production doubled on average every ten years. In 1959, US farms producing at least 100,000 broilers in a year accounted for 28.5 percent of production. That share doubled by 1969, and grew rapidly to the 1990s. Virtually all commercial growers now produce more than 100,000 broilers in a year, while the shift to larger operations continues – from 300,000 broilers in 1987 to 520,000 in 2002 and 600,000 by 2006.9 To achieve such a dramatic shift in production and consumption, the US adopted the CAFO for cattle and swine, too, and in larger and larger factory farms that have, by the present, overwhelmed the countryside, local communities and the environment. Americans in 2015 consumed on average 80 lb (37 kg) of chicken annually, more than any other type of animal flesh. The US system of innovation, application and increases in productivity was followed everywhere, especially in China and Brazil.10
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a CAFO as an AFO (animal feed operation) that has been designated as a point source of pollution. The animals are confined and they are fed, rather than grazing on grass or other vegetation – at their own contentment and pace.11 Yet the EPA had also made the determination that “facility” refers to a structure, and not to an entire farm. CAFOs are further defined by size. Large CAFOs have at least 700 dairy cattle; or 1,000 beef cattle; or 2,500 pigs if they weigh over 55 pounds or 10,000 if they do not; or 30,000 broilers if the AFO has a liquid manure handling system, or 125,000 if it does not. Medium-size CAFOs fall within intermediate size ranges and discharge wastewater or manure to surface waters, while small CAFOs are below the medium-size threshold, but are designated by local permitting authorities as significant contributors of pollutants.12 For all livestock, the mean farm size has grown, and the “production locus” (number of head sold/removed) for over half of the broiler production in the US grew from 300,000 in 1987 to 520,000 in 2002.13 At the same time, the EPA allows certain exceptions to the designation of CAFOs as a point source of pollution, enabling them to spread manure and other waste with inadequate controls, and that waste has polluted lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, wells and land far and wide. Nowhere in the world has the pollution problem been solved. This is ecological dishonesty, and, along with the replacement of small farms with large industrial facilities, it has destroyed communities and ecosystems. However you designate and define a big farm, there are huge quantities of animals and a great deal of shit, no matter whether the sheds are in North America, Asia or Europe.
Factory farms, like all successful new organizational forms in capitalism, attempt to maximize output from well-controlled – and minimal – inputs. In broiler production, as befitting vertical integration, firms called integrators own hatcheries, processing plants and feed mills. They contract with farmers to raise broiler chicks to market weight, and to produce replacement breeder hens for hatcheries. The integrator provides the farmer/grower with chicks, feed, and veterinary and transportation services, while the farmer provides labor, capital in the form of housing and equipment, and utilities.14 In this way, the workers themselves are inputs. The chicks are inputs; the feed is an input; electricity and fossil fuels for ventilation, feeding, moving and heating are inputs; sheds, roads and machinery are inputs; and antibiotics are inputs. CAFOs also manage to push some of the costs onto the public that, sooner or later, are revealed to the public and require public suffering and expenditures to manage them.
One example of this phenomenon is antibiotics. The birds are at risk for a variety of maladies because of immune systems that cannot develop fully before slaughter. Industry turned to antibiotics both to prevent spread preemptively and to accelerate animal growth. Yet many of the costs involved in dealing with complex disease vectors on the scale of pandemics – for example, Avian Influenza – or to manage frequent outbreaks of Salmonella that require treatment of patients, often in hospitals, are borne by the public. Public health specialists worry about the growing antibiotic resistance of bacteria because of the overuse of drugs. Under greater and greater pressure from regulators and medical specialists, industrial chicken farmers have been forced to scale back the application of drugs somewhat. They and their spokespeople now refer to antimicrobials as a panacea for the problem. Recall that all antibiotics are antimicrobials, but not all antimicrobials are antibiotics. This is technically true, but also an Orwellian way to deflect the concerns of the public and regulators about the risks and benefits of antiomicrobials. If you need to use medicines in the production of meat, then is this not prima facie evidence that there is something wrong with the process?
A second area of concern examined in this book is the way that industrial chicken farming has become an environmental fiasco and public health outrage. Broilers are shit champions. They produce greenhouse gases from the methane in their bowels. For each kilogram (kg) of meat, roughly 500 grams of fecal matter result – no shit. Where is it stored? Whence the pollution and how is it spread? What of the offal? How hazardous and noxious is this material? What of the lagoons of shit and offal that result from the billions of animals (chickens and their meat-protein comrades – cattle, pigs and turkeys) throughout the world? Industry – and regulators – have been slow in response, and the dangerous, bubbling liquid masses – or the dried, odiferous “cake” that is treated by industry as manageable – have spread across the landscape.
Chicken CAFOs, beef CAFOs, pork CAFOs and other such factory farm operations are dreadful ways to mass-produce animal meat as if it was like any other commodity that can be mass-produced. They are a worrisome example of how the capitalist impulse to profit while meeting consumer demand has a very dark side: animal cruelty, worker exploitation, pollution and so on. Similar systems exist for other kinds of animals and animal products that indicate the universal nature of the meat commodity machine. One example is the tiger and bear farms of East Asia that enable rife animal brutality, where many consumers do not care about that suffering, and where powerful states that could regulate or prohibit the industry do nothing. They tolerate abusive practices, and even promote or ignore them in the name of money-making.
The persistent and long-lived trade in bear gall bladders and bear bile, for example, threatens the Asian bear species.15 While this trade is legal within some countries, cross-border trade of bear bile products is prohibited by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). But it continues and has changed from being purely for traditional medicinal to providing a commodity, with bile now being found in such products as cough drops, shampoo and soft drinks. A great number of countries buy and sell bear bile products originating in other countries in violation of CITES: Myanmar, Hong Kong, Laos, the Republic of Korea – the latter often with products from wild bears in Russia where hunting and trade of them are legal.16 The bears (and other animals in this trade for parts) are kept in miserable, caged, claustrophobic conditions – roughly 20,000 bears alone, across East Asia.
There
