Just ten years after Steele’s breakthrough, the Delmarva Peninsula was the poultry capital of the world. Delaware’s Sussex County now produces more than 250 million broilers a year, nearly twice as many as any other county in the country. Poultry production is the region’s primary economic activity, and the primary source of its pollution. (Nitrates contaminate one-third of all groundwater in Delmarva’s agricultural areas)
Crowded and deprived for months of both exercise and sunlight, Steele’s birds never would have survived if it were not for the newly discovered benefits of adding vitamins A and D to the chickens’ feed. Nor would Steele even have been able to order her chicks if not for the prior rise of chicken hatcheries with artificial incubators. Multiple forces — generations of accumulated technologies — were converging and amplifying one another in unexpected ways.
By 1928, Herbert Hoover was promising a “chicken in every pot.” The promise would be realized and exceeded, though not as anyone had imagined. By the early 1930s, architects of the emerging factory farm like Arthur Perdue and John Tyson entered the chicken business. They helped underwrite the burgeoning science of modern industrial agriculture, generating a host of “innovations” in poultry production by World War II. Hybrid corn, produced with the help of government subsidies, provided cheap feed that soon was delivered by chain-driven feeders. Debeaking — usually performed by searing off chicks’ beaks with a hot blade — was invented and then automated (the beak is a chicken’s main instrument of exploration). Automatic lights and fans made even greater densities possible, and ultimately ushered in the now-standard manipulation of growing cycles by controlling light.
Every aspect of the chickens’ lives had been engineered to produce more food for less cost. So it was time for another breakthrough.
The First Chicken of Tomorrow
IN 1946, THE POULTRY INDUSTRY turned its gaze to genetics and, with the aid of the USDA, launched a “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest to create a bird that could produce more breast meat with less feed. The winner was a surprise: Charles Vantress, of Marysville, California. (Until then, New England had been the main source of breeding stock.) Vantress’s red-feathered Cornish–New Hampshire cross introduced Cornish blood, which gave, according to an industry periodical, “the broad-breasted appearance that would soon be demanded with the emphasis on marketing after the war.”
The 1940s also saw the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics to chicken feed, which stimulated growth and held down the diseases induced by confinement. Feed and drug regimens were increasingly developed in coordination with the newly bred “chickens of tomorrow,” and by the 1950s there was not one “chicken” anymore, but two distinct chickens — one for eggs, one for flesh.
The very genetics of chickens, along with their feed and environment, were now intensively manipulated to produce either excessive amounts of eggs (layers) or flesh, especially breasts (broilers). From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of “broilers” increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.
These changes in chicken genetics were not one change among others: they dictated how the birds could be raised. With these new alterations, drugs and confinement were being used not only to increase profitability, but because the birds could no longer be “healthy” or often even survive without them.
Even worse, these genetically grotesque birds didn’t come to occupy only one portion of the industry — they now are practically the only chickens being raised for consumption. There were once dozens of different breeds of chickens raised in America (Jersey Giants, New Hampshire, Plymouth Rock), all of them adapted to the environment of their region. Now we have factory chickens.
In the 1950s and 1960s, poultry companies began to achieve total vertical integration. They owned the genetic pool (today two companies own three-fourths of the genetics for all broiler chickens on the planet), the birds themselves (farmers only tended to them, like counselors at a sleepaway camp), the requisite drugs, the feed, the slaughtering, the processing, and the market brands. It wasn’t just that techniques had changed: biodiversity was replaced with genetic uniformity, university departments of animal husbandry became departments of animal science, a business once dominated by women was now taken over by men, and skilled farmers were replaced with wage and contract workers. No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.
The First Factory Farm
THE FACTORY FARM WAS MORE event than innovation. Barren security buffers took over pastures, multitiered intensive confinement systems rose where barns once stood, and genetically engineered animals — birds that could not fly, pigs that could not survive outside, turkeys that could not naturally reproduce — replaced the once familiar barnyard cast.
What did — and do — these changes mean? Jacques Derrida is one of a small handful of contemporary philosophers who have taken on this inconvenient question. “However one interprets it,” he argues, “whatever practical, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequence one draws from it, no one can deny this event anymore, no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal.” He continues:
Such a subjection . . . can be called violence in the most morally neutral sense of the term. . . . No one can deny seriously, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence.
On their own and in alliances with the government and the scientific community, twentieth-century American businessmen planned and executed a series of revolutions in farming. They turned the early-modern philosophical proposition (championed by Descartes) that animals should be viewed as machines into reality for thousands, then millions, and now billions of farmed animals.
As described in industry journals from the 1960s onward, the egg-laying hen was to be considered “only a very efficient converting machine” (Farmer and Stockbreeder), the pig was to be “just like a machine in a factory” (Hog Farm Management), and the twenty-first century was to bring a new “computer ‘cookbook’ of recipes for custom-designed creatures” (Agricultural Research).
Such scientific wizardry succeeded in producing cheap meat, milk, and eggs. In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy, and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500 percent; new cars climbed more than 1,400 percent; but the price of milk is up only 350 percent, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation into account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history. (That is, unless one also takes into account the externalized costs — farm subsidies, environmental impact, human disease, and so on — which make the price historically high.)
For each food animal species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm — 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle — but there are still some vibrant alternatives. In the pig industry, small farmers have begun to work cooperatively to preserve themselves. And the movements toward sustainable fishing and cattle ranching have captured significant press and market share. But the transformation of the poultry industry — the largest and most influential in animal agriculture (99 percent of all land animals slaughtered are farmed birds) — is all but complete. Incredibly, there may well be only one truly independent poultry farmer left. . . .
5.
I Am the Last Poultry Farmer
My name is Frank Reese and I’m a poultry farmer. It’s what I’ve given my whole life to. I don’t know where that comes from. I went to a little one-room country school. Mother said one of the first thi
ngs I wrote was a story titled “Me and My Turkeys.”
I just always loved the beauty of them, the majesticness. I like how they strut. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I just love their feather patterns. I’ve always loved the personality of them. They’re so curious, so playful, so friendly and full of life.
I can sit in the house at night, and I can hear them, and I can tell if they’re in trouble or not. Having been around turkeys for almost sixty years, I know their vocabulary. I know the sound they make if it’s just two turkeys fighting or if there’s a possum in the barn. There’s the sound they make when they’re petrified and the sound they make when they’re excited over something new. The mother turkey is amazing to listen to. She has a tremendous vocal range when she’s speaking to her babies. And the little babies understand. She can tell them, “Run and jump and hide under me,” or “Move from here to here.” Turkeys know what’s going on and can communicate it — in their world, in their language. I’m not trying to give them human characteristics, ’cause they’re not humans, they’re turkeys. I’m only telling you what they are.
A lot of people slow down when they pass my farm. Get a lot of schools and churches and 4-H kids. I get kids asking me how a turkey got in my trees or on my roof. I tell ’em, “He flew there!” And they don’t believe me! Turkeys used to be raised out on fields like this by the millions in America. This kind of turkey is what everybody had on their farms for hundreds of years, and what everybody ate. And now mine are the only ones left, and I’m the only one doing it this way.
Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly. Did you know that? They can’t even have sex. Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but these animals literally can’t reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?
These guys here, cold weather, snow, ice — doesn’t hurt ’em. With the modern industrial turkey it would be a mess. They couldn’t survive. My guys could maneuver through a foot of snow without any trouble. And my turkeys all have their toenails; they all have their wings and beaks — nothing’s been cut off; nothing’s been destroyed. We don’t vaccinate, don’t feed antibiotics. No need to. Our birds exercise all day. And because their genes haven’t been messed with, they have naturally strong immune systems. We never lose birds. If you can find a healthier flock, anywhere in the world, you take me to it and then I’ll believe you. What the industry figured out — and this was the real revolution — is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable. The animals have paid the price for our desire to have everything available at all times for very little money.
We never needed biosecurity before. Look at my farm. Anyone who wants to can visit, and I wouldn’t have a second thought about taking my animals to shows and fairs. I always tell people to visit an industrial turkey farm. You may not even have to go into the building. You’ll smell it before you get there. But people don’t want to hear those things. They don’t want to hear that these big turkey factories have incinerators to burn all the turkeys that die every day. They don’t care to hear that when the industry sends turkeys off to be processed, it knows and accepts that it’s gonna lose 10 to 15 percent of them in transport — the DOAs at the plant. You know my DOA rate this Thanksgiving? Zero. But these are just numbers, not anything anyone gets excited about. It’s all about nickels and dimes. So 15 percent of the turkeys suffocate. Throw them in the incinerator.
Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he’s seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don’t even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier, and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it’s our food. We’re messing with the genes of these animals and then feeding them growth hormones and all kinds of drugs that we really don’t know enough about. And then we’re eating them. Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff, and we’re making a science experiment out of them. Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
People are so removed from food animals now. When I grew up, the animals were taken care of first. You did chores before you ate breakfast. We were told that if we didn’t take care of the animals, we weren’t going to eat. We never went on vacations. Somebody always had to be here. I remember we had day trips, but we always hated them because if we didn’t get home before dark, we knew we’d be out in the pasture trying to get the cows in, and we’d be milking cows in the dark. It had to be done no matter what. If you don’t want that responsibility, don’t become a farmer. Because that’s what it takes to do it right. And if you can’t do it right, don’t do it. It’s that simple. And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat.
People care about these things. And I don’t mean rich city people. Most of the folks who buy my turkeys are not rich by any means; they’re struggling on fixed incomes. But they’re willing to pay more for the sake of what they believe in. They’re willing to pay the real price. And to those who say it’s just too much to pay for a turkey, I always say to them, “Don’t eat turkey.” It’s possible you can’t afford to care, but it’s certain you can’t afford not to care.
Everyone’s saying buy fresh, buy local. It’s a sham. It’s all the same kind of bird, and the suffering is in their genes. When the mass-produced turkey of today was designed, they killed thousands of turkeys in their experiments. Should it be shorter legs or shorter keel bone? Should it be like this or like this? In nature, sometimes human babies are born with deformities. But you don’t aim to reproduce that generation after generation. But that’s what they did with turkeys.
Michael Pollan wrote about Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma like it was something great, but that farm is horrible. It’s a joke. Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It’s like putting a broken-down Honda on the Autobahn and saying it’s a Porsche. KFC chickens are almost always killed in thirty-nine days. They’re babies. That’s how rapidly they’re grown. Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days. ’Cause it’s still the same chicken. It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up. Stop and think about that: a bird that you simply can’t let live out of its adolescence. So maybe he’ll just say he’s doing as much right as he can, but it’s too expensive to raise healthy birds. Well, I’m sorry if I can’t pat him on the back and tell him what a good guy he is. These aren’t things, they’re animals, so we shouldn’t be talking about good enough. Either do it right or don’t do it.
I do it right from beginning to end. Most important, I use the old genetics, the birds that were raised a hundred years ago. Do they grow slower? Yes. Do I have to feed them more? Yes. But you look at them and tell me if they’re healthy.
I don’t allow baby turkeys to be shipped through the mail. Lots of people don’t care that half their turkeys are going to die under the stress of going through the mail, or that those that do live are going to be five pounds lighter in the end than those that you give food and water to immediately. But I care. All my animals get as much pasture as they want, and I never mutilate or drug them. I don’t manipulate lighting or starve them to cycle unnaturally. I don’t allow my turkeys to be moved if it’s too cold or too hot. And I have them transported
in the night, so they’ll be calmer. I only allow so many turkeys on a truck, even though I could pack many, many more in. My turkeys are always carried upright, never hung by their feet, even if that means it takes much longer. At our processing plant they have to slow everything down. I pay them twice as much to do it half as fast. They have to get the turkeys off the trailers safely. No broken bones and no unnecessary stress. Everything is done by hand and carefully. It’s done right every time. The turkeys are stunned before they’re shackled. Normally they’re hung live and dragged through an electrical bath, but we don’t do that. We do one at a time. It’s a person doing it, handheld. When they do it one by one, they do it well. My big fear is having live animals put in the boiling water. My sister worked at a large poultry plant. She needed the money. Two weeks, and that was all she could take. This was years and years ago, and she’s still talking about the horrors she saw there.
People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.
My mother was part Indian. I still have that thing where the Indians apologize. In the fall, while other people are giving thanks, I find myself apologizing. I hate seeing them on the truck, waiting to be taken to slaughter. They’re looking back at me, saying, “Get me off of here.” Killing is . . . it’s very . . . Sometimes I justify it in my mind that I can at least make it as good as possible for the animals in my custody. It’s like . . . they look at me and I tell them, “Please forgive me.” I can’t help it. I personalize it. Animals are hard. Tonight I’ll go out and make everybody that jumped the fence come back in. These turkeys are used to me, they know me, and when I go out there, they’ll come running, and I’ll open the gate and they’ll come in. But at the same time, I put thousands on trucks and send them off to slaughter.