MODERN-DAY SERFS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 120

She says that sometimes she gets sick chicks and inferior feed from the company. The company provides
her with three types of feed for different aged chickens over their short life span: starter, grower, and with-
drawal. No doubt the chickens are “withdrawing” from the antibiotics and other feed ingredients—such
as the arsenic used as a growth promoter. She notes, “Inputs from the integrator, such as feed and chick
quality, are 80 percent of making a good chicken.” 22
Although Ruddle has three chicken warehouses, today growers are encouraged to invest in five or six
houses that each have the capacity for 35,000 birds. Each bird has a quarter of a square foot for its short
and miserable life of about seven weeks. Not only is the size of the warehouses increasing, but the scale of
poultry farms has grown rapidly, as growers try to eke out a living by increasing the volume of birds they
produce on contract. The median-size poultry operation increased by 15 percent in four years, rising from
520,000 birds annually in 2002 to 600,000 birds in 2006. 23
An analysis by Food & Water Watch found that at the time of the last agricultural census in 2007, over
one billion broiler chickens were raised on large farms in the United States. This nearly 88 percent increase
in production means that 5,800 chickens were added to larger farms for every hour of the last decade.
It has not always been this way. Until the early 1940s, poultry was raised mostly on small farms for local
consumption. Demand for poultry increased dramatically during World War II, because beef was rationed,
and poultry filled the void. Most of the chicken was raised and sold locally, and during this period many
farmers got into the poultry business. The birds sold for meat did not produce eggs; they were older hens
and roosters that were allowed barnyard freedom, making the meat flavorful and fibrous. Sold as whole
chickens, they had to be either roasted whole or cut up for frying. 24
After the war, the new interest in poultry brought federal dollars pouring into genetics research to de-
velop birds that were larger and tender, more like the young roosters, called “spring chickens.” Up until
this time, birds had been bred primarily for laying eggs. In 1946, A&P, the nation's first supermarket chain,
seeing the new market for chicken, developed a national contest called the Chicken of Tomorrow. The goal
was to create a grassroots competition for a high-yielding broad-breasted chicken that would reach matur-
ity in a very short period of time.
In 1948, the contest culminated in chicken breeders from twenty-five states submitting more than
31,000 eggs that were hatched and fed under the same conditions. Judging was done by staff from the
University of Delaware's poultry research substation. 25 The winning chicken, the Vantress, became the
standard chicken raised by growers for the next decade, and it is a distant relative of the Tyson-owned Cob-
b500 chicken grown on factory farms today.
After this development, the new era of nutrition research led to improved feed formulas containing vit-
amin B12; antioxidants; and, as discussed previously, antibiotics. Vaccinations were developed for disease
control. Buildings with automatic feeding mechanisms and ventilation equipment meant that large num-
bers of birds could be raised. 26
Small growers could not make the large capital investments necessary to build the new-style buildings
and equipment necessary for scaling up. This was particularly true because the technological advances in-
creased production, causing a decline in prices. This provided an opening for the large feed companies to
expand their role in producing broilers. They saw the economic benefit of encouraging an industry that was
highly dependent on large amounts of feed. Their access to capital allowed them to enter into the hatchery
business and to build or acquire processing plants. By 1955, nearly all chicken was grown under a contract
arrangement.
Moreover, similar to today, another driving force in creating the consolidated and vertically integrated
poultry industry was the demand from grocery stores for low-cost supplies of meat in high volumes. Ac-
cording to the USDA's Economic Research Service, during the ten-year period following World War II,