| It's tragic. The people we rage against - factory chicken farmers - are actually just victims themselves. The real criminals are the "integrators" - companies like Tyson, Perdue, and Pilgrim's Pride. They profit the most from factory farming and take the fewest risks. And when times get tough? They screw over a few hundred farmers and perhaps shed a tear that their stock price dropped a few points.
Check out this article in the LA Times: Recession closes in on chicken farmers. It tells the story of the recession from the point of view of one farmer, Andrew Meeks. Four years ago he borrowed $500,000 to build 3 chicken houses. On just 25 acres, he could raise up to 60,000 chickens.
The deal farmers like Meeks make is described well in one of my favorite articles, "Finger Lickin' Bad:"
The companies provide local growers, who work under contract, with chicks, feed, medicine, and transportation. Growers take care of the rest, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction, maintenance, and labor costs. When the company requires upgrades, the costs fall to the growers. The massive amounts of manure, too, are their responsibility. (In Arkansas alone, chicken farms produce an amount of waste each day equal to that produced by 8 million people.) Payment is results-oriented, based on measures like total weight gain of the flock. It's a system, says the United Food and Commercial Workers, that leaves 71 percent of growers earning below poverty-level wages.
If growers protest, companies can cancel their contracts, leaving farmers responsible for incurred debt, says Laura Klauke, director of contract agriculture reform at the North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International.
That's what happened to Meeks and 800-900 other chicken farmers, mostly in the South. Chicken sales are down, so the integrators are cutting off many of their farmers. And ya gotta wonder - why is it that farmers like Meeks take such huge risks when the predictable outcomes are so bad??? |
