Carole and Frank Morison became contract growers for Perdue 22 years ago on a farm near Pocomoke City. Drive down U.S. 13 toward the Morisons' place and you will see the land become flat as a plank and ideal for farming. The roads around Pocomoke City lead past one chicken farm after another, each marked by a sign displaying the name of the farm and the company that provides its chickens: Aydelotte Farm - Tyson; Sheep House Farm - Tyson; Poor Boy Farm - Mountaire; Meatball Farm - Tyson. You will see long, closed barns vented by giant fans. What you will not see anywhere is a chicken. They are there, hundreds of thousands of them, but they are all enclosed in the barns. From the road, you don't even hear a cluck.
In 1987, Frank Morison, a second-generation Eastern Shore farmer, approached Perdue to get into the chicken business. There was no such thing as becoming a poultry farmer by simply buying some chickens to raise. If you did not have a contract with a processor like Perdue, Tyson, or Mountaire, you would have great difficulty buying chicks, buying feed, or finding a place to sell your broilers after they'd reached market weight. Basically, Morison says, anything but doing business with a big processor was impossible. So Morison borrowed $200,000 against his house and his land to build a pair of 20,000-square-foot barns. Perdue specified every aspect of the construction.
After the barns were built, one day a truck pulled up to the farm and delivered 54,400 chicks, plus the feed that Morison, by stipulation of his contract with Perdue, was to feed them. Perdue dictated the number and type of chicks, which they owned and merely consigned to Morison; the amount, price, and composition of feed; and the date, 51 to 53 days later, on which workers would be back to pick up the grown birds for processing. Whenever the chickens from his farm were processed, Perdue informed Morison how much they weighed, how much it would pay him per pound, and how much the company was deducting for feed and other supplies it had required him to use. Morison says in the end he typically cleared 2 percent to 3 percent per flock, not counting his labor.
Neither federal nor state regulations require processors to divulge the exact contents of the feed they furnish their growers; the government allows the processors to treat that information as proprietary. So the Morisons say they never knew the quantity of heavy metals like selenium, copper, arsenic, and zinc, or the amount of drugs like tetracycline and penicillin, that were going into, and eventually coming out of, the birds on their farm. But they began to notice how often their farm neighbors complained of not feeling well. Carole says, "There are a lot of sarcastic jokes among farmers. You'd be talking to someone and he'd say, 'Yeah, I'm not feeling too good this week, I got vaccinated along with the chickens.' It was just a routine thing. But people were having 'the bug' too often. Kind of like flu symptoms: achy body, upset stomach, bronchial issues." The Morisons exhibited the same symptoms. Around 1995, Carole recalls, she became intolerant of antibiotics, which began to give her hives, upset her stomach, and worsen her asthma. "To this day, I still have problems."
Last July, the Morisons got out of the chicken business. They say that Perdue had notified them that to continue growing for the company, they would need to make $150,000 worth of upgrades to their facilities. They balked at the expense and decided they'd had enough of farming. They are now employed by the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, working to link farmers all over the Chesapeake Bay watershed and create local markets and local distribution systems. "Going back to raising food the way it used to be raised," Carole says.
