independent farmers. New feed formulas and medicines were not just sug-
gested to but required of contracted farmers, as were new, larger, expen-
sive buildings, ventilation systems, and automatic watering apparatuses.
If a farmer refused, he (or she) would lose the contract and be left with
investments and debts. Specialized buildings and equipment for growing
broilers were suitable to no other enterprise, not even turkey farming. So
farmers became ensnared, mere laborers on their own properties.
By the s there was a great wave of horizontal integration in the
chicken business. The great midwestern grain companies Pillsbury,
Ralston-Purina, Central Soya, and others, many of them already with mills
in the South, now acquired many southern broiler operations outright,
along with their contracted farmers. Meanwhile, too, ongoing research in-
volving industry and agricultural colleges yielded accelerating efficiencies
not only in poultry breeding and nutrition but in the architectural details
and functioning of chicken barns. By practically all American poultry
was produced on such farms, in virtually uniform industrial detail. Broil-
ers were by then the most important farm product in Alabama, Arkansas,
and Georgia and second only to tobacco in North Carolina. These four
states together led the nation in poultry production in ; Mississippi
ranked fifth, Texas was seventh, and Virginia was tenth. Even before this
date, fierce price competition had already squeezed farmer-operators even
more. Economists finally recognized that ‘‘farmers’’ had actually become
laborers and undertook to measure the wages they were earning. In an
earlystudy revealed that northern Alabama chicken farmers earned
on averageminusthirty-six cents an hour. In the chicken corporations
made record profits, but the typical farmer in the business made only about
, from broiler sales.
Another aspect of the chicken house in the countryside is the literal
squeezing of chickens. Confining animals may seem a natural progression
from so-called fencing reform. Natural it is not, however, utterly to sepa-
rate domesticated animals from the rest of nature. Fenced chicken yards
permit sky, rain, and dirt as well as movement and species society. Once the
government and retailers had created a new-model chicken, however, the
logic of taking larger and larger numbers indoors became compelling: in-
doors is safer, healthier, and management friendly. Confinement, in turn,
necessitated the universal practice of removing chickens’ beaks so the birds
could not damage one another. And as competition grew ever fiercer in the
industry, it seems inevitable that just as farmers were squeezed, so were
chickens. Animals in motion burn energy and reach broiler weight more