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This is where your chicken salad comes from. If you ever visit, you probably won’t ever eat chicken again.
Of all the ills that industrial agriculture has visited upon this suffering planet, none is worse than chicken factories. If you ever get the chance to see up close and personal any aspect of the chicken industry, do not take it; it will sicken your soul and you will probably never eat chicken again. I wish I could scrub from my mind the memory of seeing the killing line at a poultry plant (the severed heads going plop-plop-plop, endlessly, into a tank below) or simply entering a populated house to be assaulted by the stunning noise, smell, heat, unbelievable crowding and abject misery.
Let me make it clear that this is not being written by some city-dwelling, sushi-dipping vegan. As a kid one of my frequent Saturday duties was to chop the head off of Sunday’s chicken dinner. I accepted early on — because I lived on a farm and had no choice — that one can love an animal, care for it, enjoy its company and then eat it. I have done so, over and over again. I do not base my revulsion for the chicken industry on its mistreatment of chickens alone, but on what they are doing to destroy civilization.
And now they are doing it, big time, a few miles from my West Virginia home. Of course this means more to me than it does to you, but just consider this project as an example of what is going on. On a single, 95-acre site they are building as many as 20 chicken houses, each 700 feet long by 60 feet wide, each holding 50,000 birds. When fully operational the project will disgorge about a million chickens every eight weeks. To do so it will require 100,000 gallons of well water every day. To get a million chickens to slaughter weight, about 2.6 million pounds of feed will have to be trucked into the site. And at the end of each cycle, about two million pounds of litter will require disposal.
A member of the county planning commission and its Rural Development Authority, a real estate agent and developer named Robert Williams, put the deal together, applied for the necessary permits to the Planning Commission on which he sits and was granted approval in eight days flat. But it was three months later before the president of the County Commission, Harold Michael, found out about the deal — when he read in the local paper that construction had begun on one of the largest poultry factories in the state. “I was,” he told the local paper, “beyond agitated.” But he soon found there was nothing he could do to halt, or even restrain, the project.
The operators of poultry factories (the industry calls them “farms,” which is an insult to everybody’s intelligence and to the English language) that I have known over the years are the closest things to slaves that I have encountered on this earth. They told me that they “own” their buildings, typically one to three of them, which means only that they are so far in debt they have little prospect of getting out in their lifetimes. They are contractually locked in to a single company, which tells them how much they must pay for the starter chicks, how much they must pay for the feed (which of course is sold to them by the aforementioned Company) and how much they will get for the finished birds, which they may sell only to, that’s right, the Company. They can’t quit the Company, but if the Company runs into heavy weather it can and will drop them like a bad habit. Medieval vassals had more freedom than a modern chicken “farmer.”
Virtually every aspect of the work involved is nasty. Almost every day there are buckets of dead birds to be gathered up and incinerated. Feeding and watering are automated, but at the end of the cycle every chicken must be caught by hand, stuffed in a crate and loaded aboard an 18-wheeler truck. A friend of mine who had to do that for a while said, when asked what his profession was, that he “apprehended broilers” for a living. It was the worst job he ever had.
One man I know has been trying for 20 years to get out of the chicken business. But he’s too far under water. He can’t. You think having to get a vaccination is a loss of freedom? Try chicken “farming.”
But the industry’s malignance is not limited to its practitioners — far from it. A single house can generate enough ammonia and dust to affect the air quality — and thus the health — of entire neighborhoods. Extraction of ground water from underground aquifers, for which this mega-project got no special permit and is required to impose no limits, can exhaust wells in a wide area. Disposal of mountains of litter, often spread to excess to fertilize the fields of industrial farms, generates runoff that pollutes streams, lakes and rivers. The factories are ideal petri dishes for the nurturing of avian flu, another pandemic that is currently raging in the poultry houses of 50 countries and is constantly spinning off variants that infect, and spread among, humans. It is widely expected to be the next COVID.
So by all means, rural counties in West Virginia and elsewhere, keep on rejecting all attempts to zone or otherwise regulate land use in your county, or to restrain in any way this growing cancer on the failing earth, because, you know, freedom.
A brilliant and informative read. Thanks.
Thank you.
Not being responsible for growing and processing our own food, whether meat or vegetable, has led to a disturbing disconnect of people from the natural world. A disconnect that is at the root of many of the climate, social and ecologically based problems facing us today. The number of people who have no idea of where food comes from, how it is produced and to a greater extent what classifies as food is staggering. When asked where meat comes from – the answer “ from packages in the grocery store” is given more than one would think.
Large scale chicken farming, pig farming, fish, beef cattle – whatever the animal protein – mostly follow the same organizational model. Large numbers of sentient beings crowded into concentration camp type conditions and stuffed with feed (the content of which is definitely a topic for another essay) for their short miserable lives. The alternative, touted by some, is organically grown meat. How a struggling family is going to afford organic meat is beyond me. (Actually during a recent rare trip to the supermarket, I checked out the meat counter out of curiosity. The current price of beef and other meat made me wonder how anyone affords meat at all anymore).
We are fortunate in that we raise our own meat chickens, however I realize that this solution is beyond most urban dwellers. What is within reach is simplifying diets and eating further down the food chain.
It all comes down to human overpopulation, but only every time. :-(
Bizarrely, the chickens raised as in the picture above might be sold as ‘free run’ because they are not in individual cages. In one covertly recorded film clip I saw such birds were not captured by hand but by a sort of wheel rake that scooped them onto a processing line, a final indignity. I wonder if W. Virginia has passed a law, as other industrial ag states have, that criminalizes the recording of these atrocities.
What’s really chilling is that a lot of these chicken-meat factories force the chickens to become cannibals by feeding them ground-up chicken. When you buy poultry that is advertised as “vegetarian-fed”, what that basically means is that the processing facility that produced that chicken-meat didn’t make their chickens into cannibals. Or at least we hope they didn’t.
They did this with cows and gave the world mad cow disease. Also horrifying: they have genetically manipulated the chickens to overemphasize the growth of breast meat, so much so that if slaughter is delayed a week the chickens can no longer stand up because thy are so deformed. Ugly, ugly business.
…”at the end of the cycle every chicken must be caught by hand, stuffed in a crate and loaded aboard an 18-wheeler truck.”
Been there done that 40 years ago when I was 15 years old. Paid $5hr. Start time was 11pm or later. I reeked so bad my mom made me take all my clothes off outside at the sliding glass door in the back of the house & go straight to the shower. I also had to pour soapy water on my clothes then rinse them with the hose before they went in the washing machine. Disgusting work & practice all around.