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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Environmental History
- Sprache: Englisch
Why has the chicken become the meat par excellence, the most plentifully eaten and popular animal protein in the world, consumed from Beijing to Barcelona? As renowned historian Paul Josephson shows, the story of the chicken's rise involves a whole host of factors; from art, to nineteenth-century migration patterns to cold-war geopolitics. And whereas sheep needed too much space, or the cow was difficult to transport, these compact, lightweight birds produced relatively little waste, were easy to transport and could happily peck away in any urban back garden.
Josephson tells this story from all sides: the transformation of the chicken from backyard scratcher to hyper-efficient industrial meat-product has been achieved due to the skill of entrepreneurs who first recognized the possibilities of chicken meat and the gene scientists who bred the plumpest and most fertile birds. But it has also been forced through by ruthless capitalists and lobbyists for “big farmer”, at the expense of animal welfare and the environment. With no sign of our lust for chicken abating, we're now reaching a crisis point: billions of birds are slaughtered every year, after having lived lives that are nasty, brutish and short. The waste from these victims is polluting rivers and poisoning animals. We’re now plunging “egg-first” into environmental disaster.
Alongside this story Josephson tells another, of an animal with endearing characteristics who, arguably, can lay claim to being man’s best friend long before the dog reared its snout or the cat came in from the cold. Lionized in medieval romances and modern cartoons, the chicken’s relationship to humanity runs deep; by treating these animals as mere food products, we become less than human.
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Contents
Cover
Front Matter
Introduction: Egg First
Consumers and Their Role in Making the Modern-Day Broiler
Conveyor-Belt Chickens
From Cage to Carcass
Panopticon of Production
Notes
1 Chicken Culture
Chickens and World Culture
Science, Clubs and Beauty Pageants
Chickens, Consumers and War
Believing in Chickens
Notes
2 Ecology and Industry
Domestication of Chickens
Well-Behaved Chickens
Industry Joins Research
What Came First, the Chicken or the Integrated Industry?
Industrial Selection
Chicken Ecology and Welfare
Can There Be Modern Chicken Ecology?
Notes
3 Chicken as Machine
The Chicken Assembly Line
Nose Job
Industrial Dispatching
Broilers as Pieces, Parts and Nuggets
Broilers and Mechanically Separated Poultry
The Broiler in the Aura of Antibiotics and Food Safety
Broiler Diseases: A New Specialization and Always New Diseases
Food Safety and Machined Chickens in an Era of Avian Influenza
Notes
4 Shit and Feathers
Factory Farms as Nature’s Outhouse
Crossing a Broiler’s Ns and Ps
Sweet Home, Alabama
Birds of a Feather
Broilers Warm the Atmosphere
Notes
5 Pecking and Protest
Avian Protest
Debeaking of Public Discourse
Is Protest on Behalf of Broilers Possible in Closed States?
Protest from the Restaurant Industry
A Slowly Growing Rumble: The Social Costs
Notes
6 Drumsticks
Flying the Coop
The Impact of International CAFO Trade on Local Communities
Migration and Sale Without Passports or Medical Certificates
Notes
Epilogue: Broiler Chernobyl
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1
Over the course of less than a century, chickens were transformed from farmyard b…
Chapter 1
Figure 2
This nineteenth-century chicken poultry stock illustration indicates the diversi…
Figure 3
The industrial, as opposed to religious, slaughter of chicken in a modern proces…
Chapter 2
Figure 4
Before the rise of factory farming, chickens ruled the roost – and had free range…
Figure 5
As in simpler times, in less-pressured places chickens have continued to provide…
Chapter 3
Figure 6
Machine-like chickens as part of the industrial machine, hooked to an overhead c…
Figure 7
Plastic-wrapped cut-up processed chicken choices in a typical supermarket displa…
Figure 8
The now-ubiquitous nugget that has entered the life of the world’s consumers. If…
Chapter 4
Figure 9
Avian Influenza threatens the international bird trade and requires heightened e…
Figure 10
The removal of poultry manure from an industrial shed.
Figure 11
The major way to dispose of all the chicken shit is by spreading it on adjacent …
Chapter 5
Figure 12
Broilers trucked in cages to slaughter. From hatching to death, they are boxed a…
Chapter 6
Figure 13
President Vladimir Putin of Russia with a chick at the agribusiness exhibition …
Figure 14
Two workers in a Chinese wet (fowl) market.
Epilogue
Figure 15
The life of chickens with mother and daughter.
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 1
Value-Added Chicken Products: The Culture of Fast and Ready-Made
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Environmental History
Adrian Howkins, The Polar Regions
Jon Mathieu, The Alps
Chicken
A History from Farmyard to Factory
Paul R. Josephson
polity
Copyright © Paul R. Josephson 2020
The right of Paul R. Josephson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2594-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Josephson, Paul R., author.Title: Chicken : a history from farmyard to factory / Paul R. Josephson. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The irresistible rise and fall of the world’s favourite farm animal”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045569 (print) | LCCN 2019045570 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525911 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509525942 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Broilers (Chickens)--History. | Factory farms.Classification: LCC SF498.7 .J67 2020 (print) | LCC SF498.7; (ebook) | DDC 636.5--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045569LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045570
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Isaac, Nina and Emile
They bring smiles to the table,but only one is a vegetarian.
Acknowledgments
A number of people helped in writing this book, and thank you to all of them. Colby College provided financial support for Chicken with a travel grant, and my students in the lecture “Luddite Rantings” responded to my lectures on broilers with well-seasoned questions. I presented early thoughts on chicken at the “Consuming the World: Eating and Drinking in Culture, History, and Environment” workshop at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, in March 2016, and thank the organizers Michelle Mart, Dan Philippon and Hanna Schösler for inviting me to participate and learn about food from them and the other participants. Deborah Fitzgerald read the draft of the paper from the conference and shared her broad knowledge on agriculture, technology and industry. My editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, has been supportive during the entire process; his in-depth comments and suggestions make this book stronger. The two anonymous reviewers offered excellent suggestions on how to raise, shape, cut and bread my writing. Indiana Jones, Lego-master and friend, again assembled a superior index. Willie “Pops” Stargell and Roberto Clemente, as always, provided inspiration to move ahead when the hunting and pecking got tough. Pops was especially instrumental in motivating this book. He owned a chicken restaurant in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and any customer in the restaurant got free chicken when Stargell hit a home run. Bob Prince, the Pirate radio announcer, came to announce Stargell home runs with the yell “Chicken on the Hill with Will.” Willie took me to a baseball game when I was 13 at Forbes Field. Thank you, Willie. Tatiana Kasperski ate chicken with me when I prepared it, cooked chicken for me, added it to kholodnik, listened to my ideas and plucked them carefully. Thank you, Tanya.
The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the images:Frontispiece: Gamborg Gallery, Moscow, Russia; figure 1, bariskarad eniz/ istock; 2, Nastasic/ istock; 3, Alf Ribeiro/ Shutterstock; 4, travelview/ istock; 5: Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; 6, zilli/ istock; 7, Africa Studio/ Shutterstock; 8, bluebird13/ istock; 9: Gloszilla Studio / shutterstock; 10, N-sky/ istock; 11, Photoagriculture/ shutterstock; 12, : ben/ Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/16693144@N00/2512789670); 13, https://www.tvc.ru/news/show/id/57784#gid=gid_57784_0&pid=142286; 14, M M (Padman aba01)/ Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicken_market_in_Xining,_Qinghai_province,_China.jpg); 15, TommL/ istock.
“Ryaba, the Hen,” Maria Uspenskaya (1987).
Introduction: Egg First
I must have been hungry,
I ate another chicken.
With my hands
and noticed at the chicken dinner,
that I had eaten a
Cold and dead chicken.
– Gunter Grass, “Saturn”1
Sometime in the early 2000s, when traveling abroad, I noticed a different taste in the fresh chicken distributed in the European Union (EU) from that delivered to the supermarket in the United States. One could say that US poultry left a bad taste in my mouth. Equally, one could say that there’s no accounting for taste. To answer my taste confusion, I commenced investigation of how meat chickens are produced and delivered to stores. That olfactory and gustatory journey resulted in this political, cultural and environmental history of the broiler – precisely, of the meat chicken, an industrial object, hatched, shipped as chicks, raised to slaughter weight in but six or seven weeks, and then dispatched on an evisceration line for processing, transport and consumption around the globe. This study shows that the modern chicken, engineered over a century for rapid growth with meatier breasts and thighs, and the modern chicken industry, deployed for speed, efficiency and profit, leaves much to be desired from animal welfare, social and environmental perspectives. The broiler not only symbolizes, but actually is, billions of tons of chickens produced in tightly packed sheds, and billions of tons of poorly handled or stored fecal matter and offal including guts, feathers, and piles – millions – of dead animals. The broiler is generally produced by poorly paid contract workers at massive factory farms. On top of all this, the broiler presents a series of new health and safety risks, including new disease vectors for bacterial diseases and Avian Influenza.
1Over the course of less than a century, chickens were transformed from farmyard birds to factory birds that are confined to sheds for all of their short, seven-week lives.
The major production unit for the broiler, the concentrated animal feed operation (CAFO), consists across the globe of thousands of huge sheds erected in the last 10, 20, 30 years or so, with some of the sheds containing tens of thousands of fowl, each bird unable to move a more than a step, and each denied fresh air and free range – a kind of chicken gulag, where the purpose of each inmate is to devote all of its energy to the Chicken State before its eventual slaughter. The owners of CAFOs and other factory farms resist change in their chicken manufacture practices that might alter the production system in the direction of animal welfare or greater pollution control by pointing to the uncertainties and costs associated with change. Their owners claim the CAFOs need not be regulated more carefully for animal welfare because they meet national – and occasionally international – standards, they satisfy real and growing consumer demand for meat protein, and the solution to pollution and waste is being engaged head-on. Yet factory farms persist in pushing their employees, the environment and the chicken itself harder and harder, and when a factory farm is built in a pastoral, rural community, no one is happy, least of all the local residents who find their daily lives disrupted by the smell of ammonia, the sounds of trucks, and the domination of the local economy by an industry – the factory farm – that owes allegiance to owners, bosses and managers, not those residents. And, yes, European CAFO-generated chicken leaves a better taste in the mouth than the American broiler that suffers through weaker regulations in comparison to EU ones that cannot guarantee bird health or welfare.
Factory-farm chickens have spread across the world, and they are grown to maturity so quickly that it is difficult to determine even roughly what their total number is. I have tried to make sense of broilers’ numbers. Over 53 billion broiler chickens are killed annually for their meat. The broiler’s life is short and under the total control of its industrial handlers. Chickens peck out of eggshells after 21 days in an incubator. The incubator and the brooder, both nineteenth-century inventions, enabled separation of chicks from mother hens, and eggs from meat production. Being quite successful in producing eggs and freeing up human labor, the incubator and brooder accelerated the path to the complete industrialization of an animal. But, if chicks can walk at birth, then they are denied that possibility and stuffed into massive sheds. Were they only to be comfortable in their temporary homes with temperatures of 32 to 35 °C and humidity of 60 to 70 percent! But their purpose is not to move, but to eat and gain weight as quickly as possible – in the United States to, on average at 47 days, 2.6 kg, and in the European Union, at 42 days, to 2.5 kg. Since they reach slaughter weight within several weeks, they have poorly developed immune systems. Yet the overpacked sheds, filled with shit, feathers, shavings and dead birds, are breeding grounds for infections. The broilers must be fed or sprayed with antimicrobials (“vaccinated”) against Salmonella, Newcastle disease virus, infectious bronchitis, Avian Influenzas, Marek’s disease and others. The broiler is a bird, but it is also an industrial object, an output made of energy, chemical, and water input in carefully controlled environments.
The broiler is a prisoner in a technological panopticon with no prospects of hunting, pecking and roosting as chickens normally hunt, peck and roost. In the twentieth century, a kind of free-range life persists in many places, and even in urban and suburban backyard settings where they are pets, egg producers, insect swallowers, and also a source of food. In the unforgiving factory farm, various technologies of control focus the chicken’s metabolism on rapid weight gain. But free-range chickens are in the distinct minority. At factory farms, chickens occasionally get natural daylight and natural ventilation, but they are rare exceptions. Only a few countries – the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden, for example – require windows in chicken sheds. The barren, seemingly infinite sheds that prevail in factory farms have only feeding and drinking points. Higher welfare would necessitate more space (reduced stocking density), slower-growing breeds, a later slaughter time, and access to outdoors. Very few chickens in the world (less than 1 percent) are raised free-range – that means at least half the time outdoors.2 Since chickens are outdoors animals, this means a forced change in their behavior. They have been invited inside, under lock and key, for less than a century, but in this century they have become a major source of protein for billions of consumers.
This books aims at a global history of the industrial chicken. By the late 1950s, led by the United States, agricultural manufacturers had embarked on integrating the industry from bottom to top, from egg layers to chick producers to contractors responsible for shed raising, to processing plants for slaughter and reassembly as whole birds, parts, and various other products. The integrators own and control the delivery of the inputs – the birds, the feed, the antibiotics – all of which are to be tended and applied as specified by contract laborers or hourly paid workers. By the end of the century, this system had spread across the globe, with Brazil, China, France and the US among the leaders. These countries, often following the example of US factory-farm practices and businesses, accelerated a striking industrial transformation in agriculture. They have united nature and technology in a production paradigm. They have developed a single species of animal – moreover, a monoculture of animal – that is engineered to ensure a uniform product, the broiler. The broiler has been subjugated to the production ethos and the profit motive of the capitalist system, in this case primarily in the CAFO. The CAFO is a powerful tool: almost universally, nations have responded in a welcoming fashion to the broiler imperatives of efficiency, speed and industry concentration because people want cheap animal meat, and they have been slow to respond to growing community turmoil, pollution and public health threats.
Consumers and Their Role in Making the Modern-Day Broiler
A major reason for the success of the broiler has been growing consumer demand for chicken meat. Consumers are major actors in the chicken story – and in animal meat industries generally. Granted, in this book I focus on the production and technology sides of broilers. But it must be pointed out – if it is not obvious – that consumers north and south, east and west, in post-industrial nations and traditional peasant societies, have a growing, almost insatiable, appetite for meat. They want it on the table at home, and they want more poultry. They love it at KFC in China – the average Chinese person now eats more meat annually than the average American person. They want their nuggets when they pull up to a drive-in window of a fast-food joint in the US. France has become the fourth-largest producer and consumer of chicken in the world, satisfying to the French palate, and through exports also those of Saudis, South Africans, Spaniards and Brits. Americans consumed, in one day, 1.3 billion chicken wings during the broadcast of the 2018 football Super Bowl alone. July 29 in the US is National Chicken Wing Day. (Boneless wings, increasingly promoted by restaurants, are not wings at all, but slices of breast meat deep-fried like wings and served with sauces.)
Consumers seem content not to think about factory farms or the agricultural laborers who toil in them. They have offered little criticism – until recently – of deforestation of vast tracts of land to facilitate meat, especially beef, production that has finally captured attention owing to a summer 2019 crisis in Amazonia. And few people have embraced vegetarianism among the major meat-producing countries and regions – the EU, China, the US and Brazil. People want their chicken, and they want it now. They often care little about, or are unaware of, the additional costs to the globe of factory production of meat. Or perhaps they have become inured to factory-farm food because what they see in advertisements is gorgeously contrived steaming hot food to gobble, and what they see in stores comes in neat, clean, convenient packages. Over 7 billion people demand protein, and they eat a lot of chicken to get it. They want their chicken breasts breaded, fried, with parmesan, kung pao; their legs and thighs baked; their strips lightly floured, and so on – just as they enjoy eggs over-easy, sunny side up, coddled and poached. In many places, consumers have embraced foodie culture that has resulted in the glorification of oral gratification, but that some people believe provides moral cover to gluttony, and here, too, chicken is a presence.
Chicken has grown in demand and consumption for a variety of other reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, doctors recommended that their patients eat less meat with saturated fat; the knowledge for patients that a diet high in fatty foods contributed to heart disease, arterial sclerosis and cancer had been available decades earlier.3 But, after Senator George McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs published the Dietary Goals for the United States in 1977, many more physicians and citizens took notice. The National Academy of Sciences followed this in 1982 with the publication of Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer. Chicken provided an alternative safer and less fatty than beef and pork, and chicken production businesses took advantage of this situation in advertising campaigns. Some people argue that, as a result, many people turned to another kind of diet high in sugars (carbohydrates) that led to the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes that has affected a growing number of countries since the 1990s. But Dietary Goals in fact called for a substantial reduction in sugar consumption and an increase in consumption of carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables and grains. In any event, in addition to sugars – not fruits, vegetables and grains – chicken was a winner.
Second, chicken is cheaper to produce than other animal meats. The broiler has been developed into a highly efficient meat-producing machine. According to some estimates, it takes 5 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef, ungulate land and water use requirements are higher than for chickens, and labor inputs are more extensive than for chickens. Chicken meat is produced at a 2-to-1 ratio of feed to bird. And the bigger, meatier birds that mature within six weeks are simply cheaper to produce than cattle who take months and years to reach slaughter weight. Finally, even if people in many countries are eating somewhat less beef, at times there has been an oversupply of chicken, which has helped to force prices down, and this in turn provides an additional incentive for those meat-eating consumers to buy more chicken product in all its forms.
The world’s citizens are eating more meat. To put numbers on this meat, in the mid-1960s, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, annual world meat consumption was 24.2 kg/capita by “carcass weight equivalent,” in the mid-1990s this had reached 34.6 kg/capita, and in 2015 stood at 41.3 kg/capita, with a forecast of 45.3 kg/capita by 2030 – or nearly a 100 percent increase in 70 years. Of course, industrial countries are the major consumers, with consumption growing from 61.5 kg/capita in the 1960s to 95.7 kg/capita in 2015, or a 60 percent increase. Consumption has grown even more quickly in “developing” nations, even if it remains far behind wealthier countries: from 10.2 kg/capita in the mid-1960s to three times more in 2015 at 31.6 kg/capita. Much of the increase has come from poultry products, where, from the mid-1960s to the present day, poultry meat consumption has grown from 3.2 kg/capita to 17.2 kg/capita, over a five-fold increase, and with international trade very important in meeting demand. In this book, we focus on many of the leading poultry-meat consuming countries and areas that are – rounded roughly – in order: China in the first position at 19 million tons annually, followed by the US at 18 million, the EU at 14 million, Brazil at 9 million and Russia at 5 million.4
But in this book, I focus not on consumers, but on other important actors. They are the entrepreneurs who first recognized market possibilities for chicken meat, not only eggs; agricultural scientists who developed broilers; lobbyists who pushed for reasonable and favorable regulations; government officials at local, state and national levels, including legislators, and also personnel of various international agencies involved in research, standards and trade concerns; and animal rights activists, social reformers and moral critics and others who worry about the nature of factory farms.
Chicken analyzes the state of factory chicken farms in comparative perspective across the globe, including how chicken meat has become a major international trade commodity, with a focus on the major chicken nations. Readers will note some emphasis on the history of this industry in the United States. The reason for this is that the chicken CAFO in essence originated in the United States and has spread – like a farmed bird with wings – to the EU, Brazil and Asia, especially to China. No country has been immune to the pressure of industrial farming, and it is instructive to understand the nuances of its practices from one country to the next owing to greater or less sensitivity to environmental problems, questions of feeds and additives – including the use of antibiotics – how to deal with disease, efforts to keep costs down – perhaps at the expense of the welfare of animals, and farm laborers, and so on. In this comparison, one discovers that, almost universally, the greater the regulatory impetus to manage factory farms well, the safer, cleaner and more animal-friendly are the production facilities; the US is at the “less regulation” end of the spectrum.
It should also be remembered that there is ultimately little difference between one kind of animal factory farm and another: all are geared to generating meat as quickly as possible, minimizing inputs, uniformity in production from birth to slaughter, and result in similar environmental, social and other problems. Broilers are only one kind of chicken, and factory farming is only one way to raise animals. Urban farming has blossomed in a number of places. Backyard, humane raising techniques are proliferating, and chickens of a wide variety of breeds and purposes – meat and eggs – are raised in small-scale settings. But it is a relatively small number of chickens raised this way – hence, my focus on factory-farmed broilers. Here and there, I shall mention ungulates, pigs and other kinds of farm animals to highlight concerns about factory farms generally.
The chicken industrialization process is going on throughout the world, and this means that, if the United States may have been the originator of the chicken factory farm, then the other nations of the world – and the producers, regulators and consumers in those other nations – share in the moral, social and environmental problems created by the expansion of those farms. Unfettered capitalism is, in essence, the source of the factory farm: it is the driving force behind the industrial ethos of the broiler, and it is evident in the prevailing profit motive of the farms and in the logic of production. All of these countries therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, are responsible for the brutal, international system of food production that has resulted, and hardly the US alone.5
Chickens are treated as egg producers, meat producers, and dualpurpose types. The broiler – a meat producer – is most often a cross of the White Rock and Cornish breeds. There are others: red broilers, Delaware broilers (crossing Rhode Island Red hens with Barred Plymouth Rock roosters) and others. Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Langshans, Jersey Black Giant and Brahmas have also been introduced to the mix. And, finally, breeders have worked to make the broilers white-feathered. All this means that today’s broiler is quite a hybrid animal, and very productive from the point of view of rapid muscle tissue gain. Other breeds do not reach meat slaughter age as quickly, so most operations go with the White Rock / Cornish breed. As will be noted below, the intensive breeding has led the broiler to be at risk for a variety of maladies, and particularly skeletal malformation and dysfunction, skin and eye lesions and congestive heart conditions.
The broiler made a long, scientific and industrial business trip over the century that is the focus of the book; early chapters consider the cultural history of the chicken and its “pre-industrial” history. An early bible of poultry published in 1914 indicated the growing importance of fowl to the US economy, well before production shifted 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 has been progress in raising consumer and producer awareness of the cruelty and immorality of farms in some places – for example, Vietnam and Korea, which have promised to close them by 2020. Yet China remains wedded to them and is unwilling to entertain closing them at the highest levels of government, among consumers and, of course, the producers.17 Bear farming in Laos has begun to shrink, but the growth of facilities in the northern part of the country under private, mostly Chinese, ownership counters that trend.18 A European Parliament resolution of 2006 calling to end bear bile farming in China fell on deaf ears as China rejected this interference in a domestic issue,19 while tiger farming in Laos also supports primarily Chinese interests, tastes and consumers in the sale of parts, teeth, claws, paws, and meat.20 But our focus is the broiler factory farm. Suffice it to say that broiler meat, too, is traded internationally, with birds kept in miserable conditions, although not in violation of CITES – because, with billions of the fowl, they are hardly an endangered species.
Conveyor-Belt Chickens
This book draws on a number of fields and approaches to write a history of the rise of the broiler in an international context in the twentieth century, although it is largely political history, environmental history and history of technology. In their explorations of the relationship between technology, humans and nature, several scholars and journalists have focused on the economic, political and technological factors that have a significant role in the transformation of farming – generally, and in specific animal husbandry sectors – into an industrial project. They write about animals and domestication, farming and industrialization, animals and research, animals and globalization, and so on, each with a unique and important perspective in such genres as women’s history, labor history, business history, history of science, anthropology, history of technology and environmental history. They ask: what role do natural objects play in society and when do natural objects become technologies?
William Boyd argues that the “subordination of the meat broiler to the dictates of industrial production” indicates how technological change in agriculture further blurs the distinction between nature and technology.21 Focusing on broilers, he considers how they were incorporated in the technology and political-economic system. Boyd writes, “tethered to innovations in environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management, the industrial broiler emerged as a vehicle for transforming feed grains into higher-value meat products.” Like other such products, the broiler not only transformed food production – and diet – but “facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology.”22
Deborah Fitzgerald has demonstrated how biological organisms have been remade into agricultural commodities, with the production of scientific knowledge and the transformation of that knowledge into commercial practice. In this process, practice has become increasingly industrial, large-scale, profit-oriented and intensive in production. In Every Farm a Factory, she describes how businessmen, government officials, rural lenders, farm management specialists, engineers and extension agents imparted an “industrial logic or ideal” to agriculture after World War I to tie farmers into an increasingly integrated national system of production and consumption. They were pushed by market forces and by the industrial logic of rationalization and standardization. If farmers did not embrace the ideal of industrial logic, then their use of industrial methods made them part of the system. They bought into tractors, then worked with bankers who encouraged them to buy more machines, and then found themselves pushing the land to pay for the machines, and turned to specialization to produce cash crops. Factory farming continued and has expanded to this day, and broilers enable us to follow its continuing transformation.23
In another work, Fitzgerald argues that factory farms received impetus from science at land grant universities, and from companies that sold science – in the form of seeds – to the farmers.24 Ultimately, it appears that government-sponsored agricultural research and its dissemination from extension services, both of which were paid for by taxpayers, helped not so much individual farmers, but large companies that came to dominate agriculture in a variety of fields – soy, corn and now animals.
Several studies – and there are many, many more than I mention here, including outstanding investigations of CAFOs – pointed the way for this book, and to my understanding of the chicken. In the readable and informative The Chicken Book (1975), Page Smith and Charles Daniel offered a biological, zoological and cultural history of the domestic chicken from domestication. They criticized chicken factory farming – in particular, the battery-cage system of egg production.25 In a book about several different meat industries in historical perspective, Roger Horowitz discusses how manufacturers in the twentieth century managed to standardize animals from the field to the consumer in the mechanization of meat production; he includes a superb chapter on the chicken. Horowitz urges us not to succumb to the belief that the victory over nature has been complete, but to recognize a series of problems of race, gender, safety and public health that persist to this day.26 In Big Chicken, Maryn McKenna discusses how the modern chicken industry is both founded on antibiotics to accelerate weight gain and reduce losses from infectious diseases, and needs them to deal with the conditions it created, which enabled the spread of such foodborne illnesses as Salmonella, and superbugs such as E. coli with the MCR-1 gene, that are difficult, if not impossible, to treat.27
Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) criticized nascent factory farming, revealing the suffering of animals at the hands of handlers and their machines – for example, calves in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Harrison helped shape public opinion about factory farming and the need for animal welfare, triggering a series of legal reforms. Harrison’s book is no less important in the twenty-first century, since these farms have spread all over the globe. In some ways, Animal Machines is to animal welfare what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), written at roughly the same time, has become for the environment, and continues to be important in urging humans to consider the lives of now billions of factory-farmed meat animals.28 Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns, has also documented in great and disturbing detail the need for “compassionate and respectful treatment” of chickens in a series of book and other publications.29
Annie Potts focuses precisely on the chicken in a cultural and social history of the bird, and includes a chapter on chickens as meat machines in a readable and informative study.30 In a handsomely illustrated natural history of the chicken, Joseph Barber provides chapter and verse on the chicken historically, but mostly from a sociobiological and behaviorist perspective.31 These books reflect the growing concern about how chickens became meat machines, and how – tracing the cultural history of the bird – we might recover some of our humanity in recognizing its place in our global world over the centuries and millennia.
My book also engages environmental history. How can it be otherwise with such a topic? In a series of important studies, the Pew Charitable Trusts researchers note how factory farms have changed the discourse on environmental risk, changing what had largely been sustainable agricultural practices in significant ways, even taking into account growth in population and consumption. The new farms focus “on growing animals as units of protein production.” They import feed, they add medicine, all to get animals to market weight as quickly as possible. They overlook the “natural productivity of the land.”32 The question is how to sustain fertility of the soil through conservation, not driving it to the ground, and to ensure local food security; how to produce healthy, non-toxic food; how to ensure good salaries with social support in rural regions; and how to respect the goodness of animals and the environment. A variety of other foundations and organizations have highlighted growing concerns with CAFOs.33
In the opus of her work, Harriet Ritvo reminds us of the importance of the subject of animals in environmental history. She points out that environmental historians closely examine the history of livestock and domesticated animals, not only for the impact of human–animal relations on the environment, but because animals are connected with various institutions, including research institutes, agribusinesses and multinational corporations that 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 square meters). In an average year, a single house might produce 115,000–135,000 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?
