These 48-day-old chickens at a broiler house near Normangee, Texas, will head for slaughter and the dinner table in two or three days. Photo by Eva Hershaw.
By Eva Hershaw
For Reporting Texas
As Grower A turned on the lights, 28,000 chickens ascended in a frenzy of feathers and dust. Making his rounds earlier that morning, he had collected the carcasses of 25 birds. “In a normal batch, I’ll lose 300 to 500,” he said, pointing to the clipboard where he tallies the dead. Among his many duties as a contracted grower, reporting chicken deaths to an inspector from the parent company has become a point of contention in recent months.
Contracted growers take chickens, feed and technical knowledge from big chicken companies, and provide land, housing, equipment and labor to raise the birds. As the industry evolves, the growers frequently foot the bill for expensive new technologies and services. High fuel costs and loan payments also cut into profits. In these tough times, Grower A is less inclined to cooperate with the inspector. “I’m not going to help them out if they’re not going to help us out,” he said.
The inspector, in Grower A’s mind, represents everything that is wrong with the billion-dollar poultry industry in Central Texas, where one man’s problems aren’t likely to make much of a difference. Though Grower A spoke freely about his operation, his honesty could compromise his livelihood. Because contracted growers who speak publicly about the industry risk losing business, he and other growers in this report asked that they remain anonymous.
Big Chicken
Texas has opened its arms to Big Chicken, and Big Chicken has been good to Texas. In 2009, the industry contributed $2.1 billion to the state economy and had created 7,700 direct and indirect jobs, according to Texas A&M Agrilife Extension Program. The state is home to three of the four largest growers in the United States: Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson and Sanderson Farms. While the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association lists Texas as the sixth-most productive state, slaughtering 684 million chickens in 2010, the United States is second to none. The Department of Agriculture reports that the U.S. poultry industry is the world’s largest producer and second-largest exporter of poultry meat, behind Brazil. Total farm value of U.S. poultry production exceeds $23 billion.
In the last 15 years, an increasing amount of that capital has landed in North Central and Central Texas. Throughout Texas, Sanderson Farms says that it has 126 contracted broiler houses. In 2008, it reported record sales of $1.72 billion, up from the record $1.45 billion set the previous year. The company opened its first Texas processing plant in 1997 in Bryan. When it opened its second in Waco in 2007, it was the largest job-creation project in the history of the city. Texas A&M University in College Station, less than five miles from the company’s Bryan processing plant, boasts the best poultry science department in the country. The program, with close ties with the poultry industry, has enjoyed 100 percent placement of its graduates over the last 20 years.
The communities that seem to owe so much to chickens are also divided by their presence. It has driven once-friendly neighbors to silence and brought an influx of out-of-county (and country) entrepreneurs. Growers live behind guarded gates. Many have unlisted phone numbers. While some families opened their doors for this story, many more hung up the phone, asked to be left alone or suggested that journalists had no place looking into the poultry industry.
Big Chicken has brought capital and employment opportunities to some while bankrupting other, long-time community members who piled up massive, easily acquired debt. In the words of Grower B, who is deeply indebted: “Once you’re in the business, you’re in for life. You never get out. If I said any more, I’d be cutting my own throat.”
Some impacts of Big Chicken are rarely discussed. Others are impossible to ignore. A stench lingers through numerous “out-county” towns beyond the urban reach of Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco and Bryan-College Station. According to a Toxics Release Inventory published by the EPA, Sanderson Farms, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride collectively produced 2.7 million pounds of toxic pollution in 2009. A study by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality suggests that some of that pollution is finding its way into Texas waterways. Big Chicken has turned residents into activists and has dotted the landscape with gleaming broiler houses, each 500 feet long. The laws that have allowed Texas to become one of the most appealing places to raise chicken have transformed the social and physical landscapes of out-county towns.
Growth of an Industry
Historically, agribusiness in the South has benefited from an abundance of unemployed farm laborers, a favorable climate, low wages and low rates of unionization. While labor remains abundant, support from Texas lawmakers has given companies an additional reason to relocate to the Lone Star State. Texas was recently ranked the most business-friendly of all states, and the political encouragement seems to be working. As Gov. Rick Perry, now a presidential candidate, has said: “Texas is wide open for business.”
“We needed a new commercial market, and our Texas location put us squarely in the middle of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin,” said Mike Cockrell, a Sanderson Farms representative. “Our decision was based purely on marketing sense.”
Jean Hagerbaumer holds a sign once displayed near Jewett, Texas, by Citizens Rights Opposed to Poultry Pollution, an activist group that has since disbanded. Photo by Eva Hershaw.
In Normangee, 35 miles north of College Station, a sign above the salad bar welcomed diners to the Roadhouse Café: “Praise the Lord, Forever, For Always, and No Matter What.” Elvis dolls populated the sparsely placed, dusty shelves on the walls of the small diner. On a Saturday afternoon, a few customers chattered to break the silence. Outside, there were few indications that a popular resistance to the chicken industry could have emerged from the antique shops and machinery yards that line Normangee’s single street.
Miles from the political rhetoric of Austin, Jean Hagerbaumer sat in the living room of her Normangee home. She wore a large-billed hat that blocked the light cast onto her desk by an exposed bulb. Hagerbaumer took up arms 15 years ago to protest the entrance of Big Chicken into the Normangee area. “We’re not here to make friends,” she said, glancing up from her paperwork. “We’re here to make a difference.” Since 1996, community members in Normangee, Flynn and other out-county communities have pursued various strategies to fight Sanderson Farms.
In 1998, the then-titled Citizens Against Poultry Pollution hired a lawyer to stop broiler barn construction in their communities. The mobilization of neighbors to oppose the poultry industry was, for many community members, their first taste of activism. Now, with little accomplished, few of them are still fighting.
Hagerbaumer said she’s too far in to turn back. At 56, she has compiled numerous folders, USB drives and storage disks of research documenting the threats of the poultry industry to public health, animal welfare and the environment. With a Ph.D. in animal behavior science from Texas A&M, she admits her penchant for investigative research.
“It’s the way they raise these chickens that’s the real problem,” she said. “We can’t act as though these companies are designing widgets. Widgets don’t have immune systems or central nervous systems.” Each week, Hagerbaumer compiles research articles and updates them in an e-mail newsletter. “You can’t pull any one issue out of the poultry industry,” she said. “Environmental and public health, political aid and corporate exploitation. It’s all the same thing here.”
In 1955, the Department of Agriculture recorded 540 million pounds of slaughtered chicken. In one month alone, November 2010, the USDA reported 4.9 billion pounds of slaughtered chicken. The broiler industry was the first to make livestock a commodity. The success of the industry has hinged, in large part, on the vertical integration of the commodity chain, which puts each stage of production under the central control of a corporation.
Contract growers are men and women who, in many cases, became chicken growers the day Big Chicken filled their barn with chicks. “We’re a feedlot, really,” Grower B said.
According to Watt Poultry USA, a poultry industry magazine, the top four producers, Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue and Sanderson Farms, produced 52 percent of total industry output in 2011. The argument for consolidation is largely economic, with the goal of reducing inefficiencies through vertical integration. Economists also have argued that consolidation introduces greater diffusion of technology and results in consistently higher quality.
‘The Company Gives the Grower Everything’
Feet on his desk, James Grimm leaned back in his chair. His office was covered with chickens and eggs, eggs blown out and painted like Texan flags, embroidered chickens framed on the wall. Grimm, the head of the Texas Poultry Federation, an industry group, had an chicken emblem stitched on the left breast of his denim jacket. An empty bag of Bush’s Chicken rested beside a thick Rolodex and a half-smoked cigar. “The company gives the grower everything,” he said. “Technology, information, experience, feed, transport of chicken, medication and education. They’re bringing baby chicks, bringing food, and you’re growing those chickens exactly according to what that company wants.” It’s the efficiency of the system, he added, that has made corporate chicken such a success.
After years of supporting the expansion of the poultry industry, the U.S. government appears to be reevaluating its stance. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the USDA conducted a series of workshops to discuss the consolidation and contracting policies of the poultry industry in order to determine whether the marketplace is providing fair opportunities to growers. The Antitrust Division is also investigating possible anti-competitive practices among the country’s largest meat and poultry producers.
In Texas, the state continues to use taxpayer dollars to draw poultry companies. When Sanderson Farms was considering Texas as a potential location for expansion in 1995, officials in Bryan drew up a series of incentives they would later offer the company. The City Council decided not to annex the area of the proposed processing plant for 15 years, allowing the plant to remain in Brazos County and avoid city regulations. Soon after, Brazos County Commissioners granted a 10-year tax abatement to the company.
The half-million dollars paid to Sanderson before the Waco processing plant was built in 2007 came from the state’s Enterprise Fund, the largest deal-closing fund of its kind in the nation. The state forecasts that the investment will have an economic impact of $187.3 million over the lifetime of the plant, a 37,467 percent return. The investment has also meant political returns. In 2008, the Texas Observer found that 20 of the 55 Enterprise Fund corporations had either given directly to Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign or to the Republican Governors Association. The report found that three months after Sanderson Farms received $500,000 from the Enterprise Fund in April 2006, Joe Sanderson, its CEO, gave $25,000 to Perry’s campaign. By 2010, he had given more than $75,000.
Growing in the Dark
“I don’t have any idea what I feed my chicken,” Grower A said, leaning back in his La-Z-Boy. A grower for Sanderson Farms for more than 10 years, he usually interacts with the birds once a day: “I walk through the houses to pick up the dead, the crippled, make sure their water is running. That’s all they need from me.” Grower B said, “Contracted growers are the expendable vehicles of company profit, willing bodies that are thrown into and out of production on the turn of a dime.”
James Carey, head of the Texas A&M poultry science department, said, “Due to the structure of the industry, growers are independent, and the company is limited in the role they can play.” The practice of contracting growers limits the amount of liability on the company. “If a grower has a problem with the regulating authority, it’s the problem of that grower and not the company.”
Grower B put it another way: “If you want to learn about the poultry industry, you can look up one term only, and you won’t be able to get the story wrong.” The word? “Sharecropping,” he said. “Not familiar with the term? It’s a system of powerful landlords and tenants that are misused, used up, and thrown away.”
But he admitted that his feelings toward the industry were ambivalent. The terms of contracts with poultry companies are clear, and every contractor gets into the business by choice. Asked if he would do it again, he responded, “Oh, sure. Life’s good. I’m here sitting in my office, watching HBO, making lots of money. And if you’re into the biblical thing, I am doing my part to feed the world.”
Yet after 14 years in the business, his outlook is tempered: “There’s no guarantee that you won’t pour your heart and soul into it, only to have the company, eight or nine years later, hanging you out to dry. It’s a cutthroat world, and you have to take the good with the bad.”
Poultry companies use a feed-to-weight ratio competition system among contractors. Also known as the “tournament system,” companies group growers into pools of six based on the week their chickens go to slaughter. Each farmer’s ratio is calculated based on the amount of feed the company supplied against the pounds of meat that resulted. Once the average ratio is established, every grower above average receives a bonus taken from the revenue of growers that are below the average. “It’s just dangling that little carrot to keep you on your toes, doing the best you can,” said Grimm, head of the poultry federation.
The growers interviewed say they would be happy to see it go. “It’s not fair the way it is done now. We have no control over the eggs that are delivered to our houses, and they’re not all the same,” Grower B said.
A storefront in Leona, Texas. is typical of small-town business in big poultry country. Photo by Eva Hershaw.
Cockrell, the Sanderson representative, said that community divisions were minor. “We’ve had no trouble getting as many growers as we need in these communities,” he said. “Usually those who are opposed to the industry are individuals, not communities, that don’t understand what a modern chicken farm entails. It isn’t an operation with chickens running around the yard.”
It’s true that there is little bucolic imagery in Big Chicken country. Growers are discouraged from visiting one another’s farms because viruses in one house could be spread among several growers’ houses. “Sure, I’m friends with some of the growers,” Grower B said, “but I never see them. We’re told not to.”
Sanderson representatives discourage contractors from visiting each other, but there is nothing in their contract that forbids neighborly visits. “Diseases spread when farmers shake hands at church, at a soccer game, and at the grocery store,” Cockrell said. “Our growers are active members in their communities, and we encourage that. While we discourage visits to others’ barns, we certainly wouldn’t discourage our growers from having dinner with a friend.”
Driving the roads around Normangee, Franklin, Jewett and Mexia, broilers full of Sanderson chicken shine in the distance. Signs reading Tran’s Farm Inc. #28, Bill Nguyen #106, Newsome Broiler Partnership #001 and Harvey Houses #331 indicate growers to the Sanderson delivery-and-catch teams.
Ex-growers Susan and Steve Martin, whose contract operation went bankrupt and who now live out of state, were hesitant to talk about the poultry industry. “Just thinking about the chicken business opens old wounds for me,” he wrote in an email. “I have tried hard to forget the years of chicken serfdom and the pain it has caused my family.” He and wife filed for bankruptcy and eventually lost their home and farm. In an telephone interview, Susan Martin said that after spending years and thousands of dollars in arbitration seeking compensation from Sanderson, they decided it was best to leave the state and start over.
Grimm said that despite investment costs ranging from $175,000 to $300,000, most growers are happy. “Our foreclosure rate is very minute, and if you want out, the bank will give you a list of people looking to get into the industry,” Grimm said. “About 3 percent of growers leave annually, the biggest factor being old age.”
Grimm said that few contracted growers have experience with chicken before becoming getting into the business. And among the three interviewed growers, none knew exactly what their chickens were ingesting. A number of automated dials control the broiler house temperature, light, feed and water.
Sitting at his dinner table, Grower C heard his cell phone beep. He received a text message telling him that the water pressure had dropped in house No. 6. “The lights just went up, and all the birds ran for water, that’s all,” he said.
Today’s Chicken
For consumers, making chicken a mass-produced commodity has eliminated the differences in taste that existed when chickens were raised in smaller batches with foods that varied.
“I’m old enough to remember when the taste of chicken changed,” said Hagerbaumer, the activist. “I was in college, in the 1960s, when the vertical integration process started.” Even Grimm, when asked what kind of chicken he preferred, said, “Oh, it’s all pretty much the same.”
The bodies of chickens have changed over the years in size, shape and composition. Sanderson Farms adds no growth hormones or antibiotics to its chickens, but it is the exception. Consumer Reports found that from 2003 to 2007, the percentage of chickens contaminated with either Salmonella or Campylobacter, or both, rose sharply, from 49 percent in 2003 to 83 percent in 2007. The 2010 study released by Consumer Reports indicated that 68 percent of all Salmonella and 60 percent of Campylobacter reported were antibiotic-resistant. Johns Hopkins University researchers, in a report released in 2009, compared concentrated animal feeding operations to nightmare hospitals “where everyone is given antibiotics, patients lie in unchanged beds, hygiene is nonexistent, infections and re-infections are rife, waste is thrown out the window, and visitors enter and leave at will.”
One of the biggest complaints associated with the chicken industry is the potent odor that wafts from the broiler houses. “At first, there were a lot of complaints about odor,” Grower C said. “To the county judges, environmentalists, etcetera. And I don’t blame them. If I lived next to one and didn’t own it, I would not like it.” Hagerbaumer said that “the smell is truly overwhelming. You can smell it two-and-a-half miles north of town, the odor funneled down the highway. It’s enough to keep some neighbors up at night. The smell will come right through your windows.”
Beecher Cameron, a technical specialist with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said that “current odor regulations in Texas are pretty subjective. It’s a matter of judgment by the TCEQ representative as to whether or not the odor is a nuisance.” The TCEQ has an odor-reporting hotline, yet many neighbors say that, given the odor is at its worst for relatively short periods immediately after weekly cleanings, the commission’s response is almost always too late.
Bob Cryder lives across the fence from the properties of three contracted growers operating a total of 48 broiler houses. A former high school science teacher and lifetime resident of Point Enterprise, he sat in next door neighbor William Frank’s living room, apologizing for smelling of diesel, his jeans and hands stained brown from work he had done earlier that afternoon.
“But some of us have to work for a living,” he said, smiling at Franks, a retired Air Force chaplain who recently moved with his wife to Point Enterprise. “I used to love chicken,” Cryder said, laughing, “but now I won’t touch it.” He pointed out the window at the three chicken houses that lay just beyond the fence line. “Everyone was so naïve. We had no experience in this, no idea how bad it would be until it started to stink.”
Grower A pointed out: “People want to eat poultry, but they don’t realize what goes into it. People want the land that they inherited, the land passed down from their grandparents, to be free of traffic, without odors. It just isn’t that way. It smells like money to me.”
The Lake o’ the Pines
Nitrogen and phosphorous, the main chemicals discharged in industrial agribusiness, can be washed off the land into surrounding waterways, where they can fuel the growth of algae, depleting waterways of oxygen and triggering fish kills.
The Lake o’ the Pines, a two-and-a-half-hour drive east of Dallas and an important source of water to the poultry industry, has been plagued with pollution for at least a decade. According to TCEQ, the lake suffers from excess nutrient input that contributes to “turbid water, episodes of low dissolved oxygen concentration, floating algal blooms, taste and odor problems [and] fish kills.” In 2002, pollution led to the deaths of more than 9,000 fish. During the summer of 2010, high levels of E. coli –- bacteria linked to animal and human fecal matter –- led to beach closures on the lake, costing area business thousands in lost revenue from recreational visitors during the Fourth of July weekend.
A TCEQ report notes that broiler houses in the lake’s watershed could be a source of excessive nutrients in the lake. Though Texas law states that no broiler house may be within 100 feet of any water body, environmentalists don’t consider it stringent enough to keep nutrient runoff from entering waterways. In 2009, a report published by the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory found that industrial farming facilities owned by Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson Foods and Sanderson Farms collectively discharged over 2.7 million pounds of toxic pollutants into Texas rivers, lakes and streams, 58 percent of all toxics released by all facilities in the food, beverage and tobacco industries. Pilgrim’s Pride alone contributed 1.5 million pounds of waste. Neither the TCEQ nor EPA report argued that the companies had violated any law.
Aside from surface water contamination, environmentalists are concerned with the amount of resources diverted to grow such large numbers of chickens in a short period of time. According to Grimm, the industry uses approximately eight gallons of water to process and package each bird, not counting what the chickens drink.
Craig Coufal, assistant professor and extension specialist at Texas A&M, said that the feed conversion rate for chickens ranges between 1.7 and 2, depending on the age and kind of chicken being produced. “The chicken being fried at KFC, which might grow for 39 to 42 days, needs approximately 1.7 times its body weight in feed,” he said. “The whole chickens you buy at the grocery store, which could live for up to 60 days, will need upward of twice their weight in feed. In addition, we figure each bird will consume approximately twice as much water as food.”
No Longer ‘Playing Cowboy’
North of College Station, little occupies the vast green pastures that line rural highways. Oil pump jacks bow in the afternoon sun, nodding to the cattle grazing nearby. On the side of a barn, the words “Gig ‘Em, Aggies!” are a clear reminder that this is Texas A&M territory, a land of tradition, cowboys and football.
It’s also a land of opportunity. In 2009, Texas broiler and turkey companies directly employed more than 6,900. Of those, 87 percent were employed in the processing plant, 3.8 in live production, 2.4 in hatcheries and 2.4 in feed mills. That same year, according to Texas Agrilife, the poultry industry had a payroll of approximately $267 million. In Shelby County, the poultry industry is the largest employer. Sanderson processing plants pay benefits, vacation time and establish retirement accounts for employees. Many growers have used chicken to put their children through college, a privilege that they never enjoyed. For others, it has meant HBO on the television, the ticket off an oil rig, or an opportunity to spend more time with the family.
“Most of the growers were playing cowboy, working at a service station, doing anything or nothing at all,” Grimm said. “It has attracted a wide variety of people who want to be better entrepreneurs.”
When Sanderson Farms entered the communities in North Central and Central Texas in the mid-1990s, ears perked up. Grower C, who has been in the business from the beginning, explained how he got into chicken growing. “We went to one of the community meetings held by Sanderson Farms, then to Mississippi to see how some of their growers worked there,” he said. “My family has been on this land since 1860. Chicken farming is a good additional income to cattle farming, which doesn’t always go so well.”
Asked if he had doubts when entering the business, he replied: “Sure. I was skeptical at first, as anyone would be. It was a million-dollar investment to put in the houses, so I wanted to check everything out first.”
“The company provided us with information on banks,” he continued. “We had to go to Center, Texas, because no banks in the area were willing to finance chicken houses. None of the bankers here got it, didn’t know it was a good deal. The company did just about everything for us.”
He added: “I have two sons, fixing to be 25 and 22. The chicken industry has made it possible to send our boys off to school.”
140 Chickens a Minute
The chickens swing from the ceiling. They squawk and ruffle their feathers, seemingly flustered by the shining machinery below them. Each opening on the conveyor belt holds one yellow webbed foot; below each pair of feet dangles 6.5 pounds of meat that, in just over two hours, will be in boxes bound for market. In the Sanderson processing plant in Waco, 140 chickens are killed every minute. Chickens arrive in large crates and are unloaded by forklifts onto a belt that leads to a room where workers await them in near darkness. The quickly moving conveyor belt, red lights and flapping wings give the space a sense of urgency. Workers grab each chicken, placing each its feet into hooks.
They pass through two heavy swinging doors into the next room, bathed in bright lights. After a number of twists in the conveyor belt, the chickens are lowered into a tub. They disappear for two seconds, and after passing through an electric current, emerge completely still. A few renegade birds continue flapping as they approach a blade that, this week alone, has killed 1.2 million chickens. Halfway down the room, two men with knives stand in blue smocks, each slightly leaning toward their respective wall of chickens, poised for action. The chickens approach the spinning blade white and emerge dripping red from the neck down. If the blade misses the artery of a particularly shifty chicken, it is the job of these two men to complete the task.
Once sufficiently drained of blood, the chickens are mechanically beheaded and dropped into a tank of 120°F water to soften their skin and prepare them for the mechanical plucker. After emerging, they are circled upward on consecutive conveyor belts and liberated from the feet that have kept them squarely mounted to the hooks. With a decisive cut and thump, the carcasses fall onto a belt. A procession of yellow chicken feet then disappears behind another machine.
“We don’t call them skeletons. These are frames,” plant manager Todd Orman said, lifting the tarp from a dumpster size load of discarded chicken bones. In the final room of the processing plant, the remainders of a thoroughly cleaned chicken find their way into hot dog filling. Two large pipes hang over a vat that is filled with what resembles a mixture of butterscotch pudding and spray foam insulation. Hanging from the pipes are two streams of paste that appear to have hardened in mid-fall. “We don’t waste much of anything,” he added.
Community Fallout
While public opposition to the poultry industry has all but disappeared, discontent lives on behind closed doors. “Everybody is cool about the industry now,” Grower A said. “Once they realized they couldn’t do anything, they gave up. They just didn’t want anybody doing better than they were doing, that’s it.”
Jean Hagerbaumer works as an accountant in her home office and assembles a weekly newsletter that tracks the poultry industry in Texas. Photo by Eva Hershaw.
Grower C has stopped talking to his neighbors. He said that he and his wife heard “through the community grapevine” that neighbors weren’t happy with their chicken houses. Hagerbaumer, who has come to lead whatever opposition to the chicken industry remains, said that the community tension was exemplified in the case of three families in Flynn. “One family erected 26 houses a half-mile from the highway, a development that was made without telling the neighbors,” she said. “They used to have Thanksgiving and Christmas together, talked on the phone every day. But they didn’t tell their neighbors, and that friendship is over.”
Although William Franks has only recently moved to Point Enterprise, his family has owned its land there since 1921 – “long before the chickens arrived,” he said. “In Point Enterprise, there is a sense of identity and community. There are a number of very old families in the area that get together every quarter.” Despite a number of community meetings aimed at stopping the chicken industry from entering the area, the town is now surrounded by broiler houses. “The hope is that they close down, or at the very least invest enough to be less of a nuisance,” Franks said. “That might be the desire, but probably not realistic. Even to the legislators, it’s not realistic.”
For the families and communities of North Central and Central Texas, Big Chicken has left an unmistakable mark. The question of whether the poultry industry has had a positive net impact is hard to answer. Even contracted growers on the Sanderson payroll are uncertain. “You often wonder why you can’t get there, why you can’t get on top of the game,” Grower A said. “The industry is getting harder and more expensive every year. Some people work even harder than me and can’t get there. It’s a tough business.”
His wife joined him in the living room with two glasses of iced tea. Seated together, they flipped through the channels on a big-screen TV. “We’ve made a good life here, but the community struggle puts stress on you,” he said. “You didn’t know why your friend was raising Cain, you know?” A hundred yards beyond the TV screen and the shiny Ford pickup outside, machines dumped feed through automated lines, water dripped from tubes, and more than 150,000 chickens ate, drank and grew in preparation for market. “I could get out if I wanted,” Grower A said. “But then what? This land is all I’ve got, and it’s gone to the chickens.”