Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
growers' . . . but they tell us everything we do. If there's just a per-
sonality conflict with your company service tech, you can lose your
contract over that. You can talk to another company, but Tyson
wouldn't sign another farmer that Pilgrim's cut off.”
Reports Karen Charman: “Most chicken growers are reluctant
to talk publicly for fear of reprisals. . . . They say the corporations
that control the chicken industry hook new growers on the promise
of making a good, steady income at home. Instead, growers find
themselves trapped in debt-laden relationships that turn them into
serfs at the mercy of the companies that make a fortune on their
backs. . . . Nobody knows how many poultry growers have lost
their contracts because only the companies have that information,
says Mary Clouse, who [formerly ran] . . . the Contract Agriculture/
Poultry Project at the Rural Advancement Foundation International
(RAFI). Poultry companies say the number is very low.”
Family farmers are paying a high price—not only financially, but
emotionally as well. Concern over the decline in independent fam-
ily farms, coupled with the pressures of reduced quality of life and
potential resultant socioeconomic disadvantages when factory
farms move in, can even contribute to CAFO-related posttraumatic
stress disorder symptoms.
In the late 1980s, we started to see more and more pig factory
farms being built in Iowa and North Carolina. It was around that
time that we attended a couple of meetings where representatives
of large agribusiness corporations were pushing the idea that fac-
tory farming was the wave of the future. We knew better and so,
rather than follow this trend of industrialization, we continued tra-
ditional ways of raising animals, going so far as to invent the term
“free range pigs.”
In 1994, I met Bill Niman and began marketing pig to Niman
Schell in San Francisco. This eventually led to a network of farmers
who became the Niman Ranch Pork Co. LLC in 1998, which today
