From the Chickens to the Crabs - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 66

in an incubator and matured in confinement here. By the 1940s and 1950s, large
poultry-feed companies began contracting with farmers to share profits from raising
birds in exchange for feed. Over time, manufacturers and feed distributors consolid-
ated. Today five large, fully integrated poultry companies, or integrators, process and
market poultry in the Shenandoah Valley on a giant scale: Cargill Turkey Products, Ge-
orge's Foods, Perdue Farms Inc., Pilgrim's Pride Corp., and Tyson Foods Inc.
Think of this poultry production system as a protein conveyor belt. Integrators pro-
duce chicks in large incubators (no hens are involved). When they are hardly a day old,
the chicks are shipped on consignment, a thousand at a time. The farmers raise the
chicks until they've “grown out” into mature birds, which takes six to eight weeks. Dur-
ing that time, the farmers are responsible for the health and feeding of the birds, and
the disposal of their waste. The chickens are raised on feed and medications mandated
by the integrators. The birds are housed by the tens of thousands—roughly one chick-
en per three-quarter square foot—in poultry sheds. Standard sheds house 27,200 birds;
some hold 42,000. Small poultry operations have one or two sheds; bigger ones have up
to ten, fifteen, or even twenty-five sheds. After about seven weeks, the grown chickens
are retrieved by the integrators and sent to a plant for processing into plastic-wrapped
skinless breasts.
As I learned about the poultry industry, I began to see Rockingham County through
a darker lens. What appeared to be small family farms and simple chicken shacks were
revealed to be more akin to a stage set for industrial-farming operations. The bright
little signs posted by every driveway—Perdue, Tyson, Cargill—are placed there so that
the feed trucks know where to deliver their proprietary loads, but they are also heralds
of corporate turf.
Each integrator has its own feed recipe, which is fiercely protected as a trade secret
and subject to little government oversight. The farmers don't know what's in the feed,
consumers don't know what's in the chicken they eat, and hydrologists don't know what
kinds of chemicals are being washed from chicken manure into waterways.
“Farmers have no rights,” said Carole Morison , who grew over 6.25 million chickens
for Perdue, starting in 1986. She finally quit the business in 2008, after Perdue insisted
she upgrade her two chicken houses, at a cost of $150,000, and she refused. “There's
no equality between the company and the farmer—those aren't ourchickens, they are
theirs.he integrators hold title to them as long as they are alive. But if a chicken dies,
which happens, it's our problem. The only things the farmer owns are the mortgage, the
dead chickens, and the manure.”
Once the integrators take a shipment of chickens away, the tenant farmers must
“scrape out” their chicken sheds: they shovel the litter—an odoriferous mound of guano