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This book draws on a number of fields and approaches to write a history of the rise of the broiler in an international context in the twentieth century, although it is largely political history, environmental history and history of technology. In their explorations of the relationship between technology, humans and nature, several scholars and journalists have focused on the economic, political and technological factors that have a significant role in the transformation of farming – generally, and in specific animal husbandry sectors – into an industrial project. They write about animals and domestication, farming and industrialization, animals and research, animals and globalization, and so on, each with a unique and important perspective in such genres as women’s history, labor history, business history, history of science, anthropology, history of technology and environmental history. They ask: what role do natural objects play in society and when do natural objects become technologies?

William Boyd argues that the “subordination of the meat broiler to the dictates of industrial production” indicates how technological change in agriculture further blurs the distinction between nature and technology.²¹ Focusing on broilers, he considers how they were incorporated in the technology and political-economic system. Boyd writes, “tethered to innovations in environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management, the industrial broiler emerged as a vehicle for transforming feed grains into higher-value meat products.” Like other such products, the broiler not only transformed food production – and diet – but “facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology.”²²

Deborah Fitzgerald has demonstrated how biological organisms have been remade into agricultural commodities, with the production of scientific knowledge and the transformation of that knowledge into commercial practice. In this process, practice has become increasingly industrial, large-scale, profit-oriented and intensive in production. In Every Farm a Factory, she describes how businessmen, government officials, rural lenders, farm management specialists, engineers and extension agents imparted an “industrial logic or ideal” to agriculture after World War I to tie farmers into an increasingly integrated national system of production and consumption. They were pushed by market forces and by the industrial logic of rationalization and standardization. If farmers did not embrace the ideal of industrial logic, then their use of industrial methods made them part of the system. They bought into tractors, then worked with bankers who encouraged them to buy more machines, and then found themselves pushing the land to pay for the machines, and turned to specialization to produce cash crops. Factory farming continued and has expanded to this day, and broilers enable us to follow its continuing transformation.²³

In another work, Fitzgerald argues that factory farms received impetus from science at land grant universities, and from companies that sold science – in the form of seeds – to the farmers.²⁴ Ultimately, it appears that government-sponsored agricultural research and its dissemination from extension services, both of which were paid for by taxpayers, helped not so much individual farmers, but large companies that came to dominate agriculture in a variety of fields – soy, corn and now animals.

Several studies – and there are many, many more than I mention here, including outstanding investigations of CAFOs – pointed the way for this book, and to my understanding of the chicken. In the readable and informative The Chicken Book (1975), Page Smith and Charles Daniel offered a biological, zoological and cultural history of the domestic chicken from domestication. They criticized chicken factory farming – in particular, the battery-cage system of egg production.²⁵ In a book about several different meat industries in historical perspective, Roger Horowitz discusses how manufacturers in the twentieth century managed to standardize animals from the field to the consumer in the mechanization of meat production; he includes a superb chapter on the chicken. Horowitz urges us not to succumb to the belief that the victory over nature has been complete, but to recognize a series of problems of race, gender, safety and public health that persist to this day.²⁶ In Big Chicken, Maryn McKenna discusses how the modern chicken industry is both founded on antibiotics to accelerate weight gain and reduce losses from infectious diseases, and needs them to deal with the conditions it created, which enabled the spread of such foodborne illnesses as Salmonella, and superbugs such as E. coli with the MCR-1 gene, that are difficult, if not impossible, to treat.²⁷

Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) criticized nascent factory farming, revealing the suffering of animals at the hands of handlers and their machines – for example, calves in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Harrison helped shape public opinion about factory farming and the need for animal welfare, triggering a series of legal reforms. Harrison’s book is no less important in the twenty-first century, since these farms have spread all over the globe. In some ways, Animal Machines is to animal welfare what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), written at roughly the same time, has become for the environment, and continues to be important in urging humans to consider the lives of now billions of factory-farmed meat animals.²⁸ Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns, has also documented in great and disturbing detail the need for “compassionate and respectful treatment” of chickens in a series of book and other publications.²⁹

Annie Potts focuses precisely on the chicken in a cultural and social history of the bird, and includes a chapter on chickens as meat machines in a readable and informative study.³⁰ In a handsomely illustrated natural history of the chicken, Joseph Barber provides chapter and verse on the chicken historically, but mostly from a sociobiological and behaviorist perspective.³¹ These books reflect the growing concern about how chickens became meat machines, and how – tracing the cultural history of the bird – we might recover some of our humanity in recognizing its place in our global world over the centuries and millennia.

My book also engages environmental history. How can it be otherwise with such a topic? In a series of important studies, the Pew Charitable Trusts researchers note how factory farms have changed the discourse on environmental risk, changing what had largely been sustainable agricultural practices in significant ways, even taking into account growth in population and consumption. The new farms focus “on growing animals as units of protein production.” They import feed, they add medicine, all to get animals to market weight as quickly as possible. They overlook the “natural productivity of the land.”³² The question is how to sustain fertility of the soil through conservation, not driving it to the ground, and to ensure local food security; how to produce healthy, non-toxic food; how to ensure good salaries with social support in rural regions; and how to respect the goodness of animals and the environment. A variety of other foundations and organizations have highlighted growing concerns with CAFOs.³³

In the opus of her work, Harriet Ritvo reminds us of the importance of the subject of animals in environmental history. She points out that environmental historians closely examine the history of livestock and domesticated animals, not only for the impact of human–animal relations on the environment, but because animals are connected with various institutions, including research institutes, agribusinesses and multinational corporations that seek to make and patent them and their feeds. They include hunters, trappers and furriers with the rise of commercial interests and overexploitation; not only farmers, but breeders, scientists, and researchers. They are local people and consumers at supermarkets. They are connected to granges and cooperatives and extension services.”³⁴

Several scholars note how the production of livestock is no different from the production of many other products, within and outside of the agricultural world – for example, automobiles – with specially designed buildings to maximize controlled space, minimize input and significantly increase output. For livestock, special buildings, barns and outbuildings, motors and conveyors have entered agribusiness. The products include chickens, pigs, cattle – both dairy and beef – and so on. As Susan McMurry notes, their industrial production both benefits from advances in public health and becomes entrapped by them. For example, advances in bacteriology changed dairy production, with government sanitation officials pushing regulations to ensure safe milk production as it was transported from the countryside to the city, and with rising milk consumption as a substitute for human breast milk. Perhaps pasteurization, bottling and cooling to standards was the only possible outcome. She notes that barns, trucks, highways, local plants “entered the mix of places where bacteria might grow in milk.” For the barn, McMurry writes, “metal ventilators sprouted from the roof ridge; milk houses appeared; hog houses were demolished or moved; poultry houses were relocated; new privies were built; water systems were installed (at least at the barn and the milk house); and new horse stables were built.” Eventually, human handling was reduced to a minimum,³⁵ as it has been in the case of broilers. Indeed, chicken meat production reflects all of these tendencies. Even the architectures of chicken production reflect the considerations of maximum efficient use of space and reliance on modern inputs of food and drugs to make those spaces work optimally. In many places below, the reader will have the opportunity to consider the way in which technological advances seem to impel the factory farm onward – what I refer to as a technological imperative that suggests a determinist argument.

Broiler production of similar chicken units is essentially no different from the production of monocultures of various other plants – bananas, coffee, rubber and so on. These living things are based on the drive for manageable units of output based on industrial understandings, and the belief among promoters that they can prevail over climate, seasons, terrain – whatever the physical, geophysical or biological problem. As Richard Tucker demonstrated, the American economic strength in Central and South America, the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim had significant impacts on local environments and people through colonial, plantation and post-colonial production of sugar, fruit, coffee, rubber, cattle and timber. American business interests, with the help of government, sought to establish monocultures of bananas, rubber and other commodities, using slaves or indentured labor, armed with dangerous chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers that eventually polluted water and soil, and also antibiotics. He notes how financial interests pushed the creation of these monocultures.³⁶ Investment went into production and extraction, not the development of civilian infrastructure – roads, hospitals, stores and schools. Often with the assistance of local and national officials, they have pushed the monocultures with the promise of local benefits, and yet the local people suffer the burdens of production, social disruption and environmental change.³⁷ In the modern chicken industry, similarly, and around the globe, local producers – contract laborers – and their families work in difficult conditions for low wages, while big businesses far away reap the harvests and push the costs of environmental and social disruption onto those laborers and their communities.

Some people have written about the industrialization of agriculture as natural and expected, if from a technologically determinist and nearly utopian perspective, ignoring the costs and consequences, and suggesting that local communities will always adjust. Hiram Drache, a historian of agriculture, writing in the 1970s, insisted that largeracreage farms were the most efficient and modern of American farms, while noting that family farms, the mythical foundation of American republicanism, would survive the onslaught of technological change. By efficient, he meant by such measures as acres harvested per machine, yield per acre, and yield per animal. He did point out an important fact: far from being a product of capitalism alone, government programs were central in stimulating the growth of large-scale agriculture,³⁸ as they had been directly and indirectly through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Powerful machines – greater horsepower – enabled one farmer to do the work with fewer hours of hired labor per season, while comfort at the controls – two-way radio, air conditioning, a smooth ride – enabled expansion of farms to the horizon. Drache argumentatively suggested that government programs of “a non-price support nature, such as Occupational Safety and Health standards, environmental regulations, and social and labor legislation” were inappropriate, for they would discourage the small-farm operator from staying in the business as too expensive.³⁹

Yet Drache found it possible to conclude that, even if large-scale practices were advantageous for all meat-animal industries, the farms of the twenty-first century would still be family-oriented units.⁴⁰ On this level alone, Drache ignored the fact that massive farms armed with industrial tools, lax regulation, and government subsidies do not constitute “family farms.” He optimistically noted that the social implications of the tying of industry to agriculture would be substantial, but insisted that “people will adjust and the end result will be a better life style.” He tried to suggest that people who protest against this situation are Luddites of some sort, like those who railed against the Industrial Revolution where all turned out for the better.⁴¹

Yet the family farm has for a long time not been a dominant political and economic feature of US agriculture, nor of that in many European countries, although the myth of these family farms persists, and, wherever CAFOs appear, the smaller producers seem to suffer.⁴² Indeed, family farms are physically smaller, have lower average income, an increasingly small share of overall production, and receive fewer benefits and subsidies than larger farms, including those privately owned or run by absentee owners and corporations. In fact, the top ten “farmers” in the US in 2018 receiving subsidies were corporations with an average annual subsidy of $18 million each.⁴³ In Europe, the same “myth” of family farms as being somehow, by the twenty-first century, stable economic and social units of production prevails.⁴⁴ Rather, the factory farm dominates in such forms as the CAFO, and they are a shitstorm of “inevitable progress.” We cannot ignore the human, social, biological and environmental costs of the factory farm any more than the pollution, horrific social trauma and maimed and killed workers of the Industrial Revolution.

This book cannot give full attention to the social history of chicken factory farms, both because the subject requires its own complete study, and because the chicken itself is our focus. But the chicken itself extends far beyond the fields and broiler sheds to the homes and farms nearby, to the local banks and government, to social services and infrastructure, all of which seem to collapse under the weight of CAFOs – and smell none too good either. In CAFO farming, tautologically and dangerously, large farms dominate, and where there are large numbers of farms, the larger ones by far produce more animals. Their only concern is output of chicken units. CAFOs respond to shareholders and CEOs and other investors who are distant from the surrounding towns and the people in them. Who cares for and tends to the animals? These people are contract laborers, or migrant workers, who rarely receive such sufficient social benefits as insurance, and who face great financial uncertainty and challenging physical labor. It may be that Europe’s safety net makes a big difference for CAFO workers, but in most of the world these farmers live on the edge of economic uncertainty.

This is a hard life, dominated by obligations to integrators that control virtually all of the inputs, and the margins for success or failure are slim for the labor contractors, especially considering capital costs. A pair of broiler houses, with automated equipment for feeding and watering the birds, and climate control systems, mechanized equipment to gather broilers for shipment to processing plants (“chicken harvesters”) and to remove litter from the houses, can cost from $350,000 to $750,000. Broiler houses built in the last decade cover 20,000 square feet (40 feet wide and 500 feet long; approaching 1,900 square meters). In an average year, a single house might produce 115,000–135,000 broilers; few houses built recently are less than 20,000 square feet. Some grow-out operations have up to 18 houses, and this enables continuous production when some sheds undergo litter removal and upkeep.⁴⁵ This is a radical change from the much smaller operations in the 1950s and 1960s, and who can afford these costs and these sheds?

The writer Paul Crenshaw gave a sense of the social costs of chicken factory farms when writing about the industrial transformation of Arkansas into a chicken coop. Arkansas, the home of Walmart, the largest company in the world by revenue, that sells inexpensive Chinese and other goods under the banner of “Made in America,” is also the home of Tyson, the largest chicken operator in the world. Crenshaw observes that Arkansas roads and highways are bordered with chicken factories and packing plants, and filled with trucks carrying birds – live for growing, and dead for sale. Beyond the strips of natural beauty, near streams and creeks and rivers, workers in factories push and prod the birds to maturity, and cut and drain them, transforming them in seconds into food. The guts and shit truly have no final resting place, but fill the air with acrid odor and the ground and water with toxic mess. Crenshaw refers to “gut trucks” that “weave along roads, leaving a swath of olfactory offense in their wake.” He notes the “chemistry lesson” required to understand the grotesqueries of decomposition.⁴⁶ Crenshaw chronicles the scale of chicken houses, 100 yards long with 25,000 bird residents, tended to by poorly paid laborers who are cleaning, checking, carefully controlling lighting, fixing ventilation, regulating temperature, navigating rodents, maggots, flies and “the dead pits.” The dead pits, covered with concrete slabs, are cauldrons of crap. These houses are teaming with motion, all of it natural – yet none of it natural.⁴⁷ No longer do chickens hunt and peck, find worms and bugs, and lounge in the shade. They are pushed and prodded, vaccinated and fed, in an artificial environment that limits their aggressiveness, packed tightly, to grow in vertically integrated factories like those of Tyson, in sheds like those of Tyson, to train their movements entirely to fattening and death. When they have been evacuated from the houses, laborers enter to fight the accumulated smell, feces and urine, fumigate and prepare the sheds for more sweet little chicks to begin the transformation into meat machines.⁴⁸ The chickens shit in their food, and Crenshaw suggests that the way we raise them means that we defecate in our own food, too.