44 / Chapter 2
as one day old from a company that controls every aspect from
breeding to “processing,” or slaughter and packaging, of fi nished
“products.” Referred to as integrators, these companies are poultry
complexes that orchestrate every aspect of production. The com-
plex incorporates a feed mill, a slaughter house or processing facil-
ity, and a group of producers. The producers are responsible for
“grow-out” of chicks to adult broilers ready for slaughter, which
gives the birds a life-span of about forty-two days. Broiler produc-
ers raise fi ve or six batches of chickens in a typical year.
In the United States, broiler production is concentrated among
approximately forty-three integrated poultry complexes.^10 The top
four fi rms produce more than 50 percent of the chicken raised for
meat. In addition to corporate concentration, broiler chicken produc-
tion is also concentrated geographically, in “a few southern states
where farmers are highly dependent on contract arrangements for
income and livelihood.”^11 Concentrating production in warm cli-
mates eliminates the expense of heating the growing facilities.
Another three hundred million of the animals raised for food
are egg-laying hens, who produce eggs for about two years, when
their “spent” bodies, to use the poultry industry’s term, are slaugh-
tered for soup, school lunches, and other products containing low-
quality meat.^12 All but around 5 percent of these hens spend their
lives in large, windowless sheds. They live with fi ve to eleven other
hens in eighteen-inch-by-twenty-inch wire cages, known as “batter-
ies.”^13 In egg production facilities, four tiers of battery cages run
the length of a warehouse. Feeding and watering is automated, and
the birds are kept in darkness much of the time. The battery sys-
tem signifi cantly reduces the human labor needed to produce eggs.
In the 1960s, when most fl ocks were still relatively small (under
a thousand birds), one grower oversaw a single fl ock. Today, the
ratio is roughly one grower for thirty thousand birds.^14 The advan-
tages of the battery system are limited to the grower. The hens
endure tremendous overcrowding, without enough room to spread
a wing, much less move. Their feet are often injured by the wire
mesh fl ooring of their cages. Their natural instinct to establish ter-
ritory and a pecking order is managed by “debeaking,” in which