Authors: Maureen Ogle
Without mass outlets and a mass market, there wasn’t much incentive to mass-produce chickens. Even Armour and Swift found it difficult to achieve economies of scale that would lower the price of poultry to the level of pork or beef. They sold virtually their entire output to a narrow market: high-end hotels and restaurants, posh resorts, railroads that offered first-class dining services, and caterers that specialized in serving what one broiler industry analyst called “swell spreads.”
That narrow market also explains why the packers chose to invest in feeding operations: those customers demanded a uniform product, which could be achieved only by controlling the birds’ diet. “Hotel men and restaurant keepers,”
one poultry man explained, “have found through experience that it does not work well to serve one banqueter half a large chicken and the next man a small one.” But size mattered, too:
commercial kitchens prized two-pound broilers because those could be halved and cooked without subjecting impatient diners to a long wait. Finally, as a USDA employee explained, the packers’ “juicy, milk-fed”
birds were superior to barnyard “ranger” chickens.
In the 1920s, the poultry industry was barely an industry. Production was limited, the price was high, and few Americans enjoyed access to chicken on a regular basis. When members of the Republican Business Men, Inc., ran a full-page advertisement in the
New York Times
in the fall of 1928 touting the virtues of their party and presidential candidate Herbert Hoover, they promised that Republican prosperity would put “A Chicken in Every Pot.”
(Hoover himself, it should be noted, never made such a promise.) The Republican businessmen were wrong: the job of putting a chicken in every pot would ultimately have little to do with Republican prosperity and much more to do with factorylike efficiency and taxpayer subsidies.
When the agricultural crisis hit Georgia in the 1920s, many businessmen and employees at the state’s land grant school, the University of Georgia (UGA), latched on to both chickens and eggs as replacements for cotton and as resources that would revive and diversify the ailing economy. They lobbied the legislature for funds to support a new program aimed at increasing livestock production, especially poultry. UGA faculty helped organize a poultry trade association that coordinated the production and marketing of both chickens and eggs. Bankers encouraged these projects
with loans to businessmen, and a railroad line sponsored “poultry specials,” train cars loaded with chickens and headed for northern cities. Forty-one hatcheries opened in Georgia during the first half of the 1920s, and executives at Swift and Company encouraged the trend by buying up every broiler and fryer that company agents could find and slaughtering them at an existing packing plant. But the new chicken boosters weren’t interested in simply populating farms with barnyard birds. Rather, they specifically promoted an industry based on science and modeled on the factory, urging struggling farmers to build modern chicken coops that included electricity and heating. Officials at Georgia’s Department of Agriculture helped entrepreneurs build hatcheries and encouraged poultry growers to start with purebred stock rather than barnyard “scrubs.”
But all that cost money, and that was the one thing that local farmers didn’t have. That’s why so much of the new poultry industry ended up in the hands of people other than conventional farmers: bankers were willing to offer the loans needed to get the project off the ground, but they preferred dealing with borrowers experienced in business. Enter men like Jesse Jewell. In many respects, his migration from shopkeeping to poultry production amounted to a one-for-one substitution: for decades, merchants like him had provided farmers and sharecroppers with feed, seed, or fertilizer in advance of the growing season, taking payment when the crop was sold. Jewell simply swapped chickens for feed and seed, benefiting from the research and expertise provided by UGA faculty. He also enjoyed assistance provided by the manufacturer of the feed he sold: the company extended credit so that he could buy the feed and chicks that he loaned to local farmers, helped him establish a modern bookkeeping system, and dispatched a salesman to accompany Jewell on tours of the countryside to recruit farmers. Moreover, by the time Jewell settled on chickens as his salvation, there was new cash floating around the region. The AAA had paid out $8 million for the cotton plow-up, money that landed in the pockets of landowners who were looking for ways to invest it. The New Deal also offered other, indirect agricultural subsidies: in 1935, the USDA launched the Poultry Improvement Program and committed manpower and intellectual capital to the study and control of poultry disease. Thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Roosevelt administration’s investment in rural electrification, southern farmers obtained access to electricity that enabled Jewell’s growers to install automated feeding and watering devices. Those tools, which were often designed at land grant engineering programs, saved labor and allowed growers to increase the number of birds they could feed.
Other subsidized research
also shaped the new broiler industry. In the then-new field of genetics, researchers studying how and why traits passed from parent to offspring often used chickens as their research subjects because they were small and easy to handle, and they matured in weeks rather than months. Compared to other animals, hens have a short reproductive cycle, and their offspring develop not in the womb but in a separate container, the egg. By the 1920s, the chicken was one of the most studied of all domestic livestock. Even before the broiler industry took shape, scientists had learned a great deal about how to increase egg yields and raise healthier chickens. The ubiquity of laboratory chickens also led, inadvertently, to a central component of factorylike livestock production: confinement. Researchers who worked with chickens studied their subjects in a confined setting so that they could control light, temperature, and humidity and monitor the birds’ food intake. Scientists soon realized that confined hens lived longer and laid more and healthier eggs than their free-ranging farmyard cousins. Confinement also eliminated the primary obstacle that stood between poultry producers and efficient, large-scale production: flock size. Chickens are highly susceptible to disease, and every farmer knew that the bigger the flock, the higher the incidence of disease, and the harder those outbreaks are to control. In a confined setting, however, growers could quickly identify and remove sick birds. The major obstacle was that confined birds invariably developed rickets, or “leg weakness” as farmers called it, leaving them unable to walk and preventing chicks from maturing and hens from laying. But in the early 1920s, researchers discovered that adding vitamin D to chicken feed eliminated the need for sunlight. That “phenomenal”
discovery, raved one expert, opened the door to “specialization and the application of factory methods” to poultry production.
All these factors—expertise, research, money—shaped the new broiler industry, thanks to which, wrote one man, chicken farming was headed toward “commercialized production
on an efficient and . . . large scale.” Jewell was no farmer, and that was fine with the people who urged him and others to build the new industry. What supporters wanted was an agricultural sector that operated more like a factory than a farm.
Jewell spent the late 1930s expanding his business. He contracted with more growers and sought out quality chicks for them to raise, and he cultivated outlets where he could sell the birds, which he continued to drive to market himself. But the onset of World War II presented an unexpected opportunity for rapid expansion and solidified the industry’s reliance on contract farming, automation, large scale, and integration of livestock production with processing. As had been true during the previous world war, demand for all goods, especially foodstuffs, rose sharply (and ended the depression), but few industries benefited more than the one devoted to making broilers. At the outset of the conflict, federal officials decided to set aside most of the nation’s pork and beef for the troops, in part because of their value for both nutrition and morale, but also because those could be shipped as, say, smoked hams or canned beef stew. But the commercial poultry industry was so new that an infrastructure for packing and processing its meat was limited, and bureaucrats charged with managing the nation’s food kept the chickens at home. (Turkeys, however, were shipped to troops for morale-boosting Thanksgiving and Christmas meals on the front lines.) USDA officials launched a “Grow More Poultry Program,” the public feasted on chicken fixed every which way, and military buyers grabbed as much as they could to feed to men and women stationed stateside.
World War II also drained American agriculture of its labor supply, a fact that, as we’ll see later, would have a profound impact on the way farmers raised livestock. Even before the United States entered the war, factories had geared up to supply warring countries with materiel, and men and women decamped from the farm for jobs those factories provided. In Georgia alone, between 1937 and 1941, 30 percent of agricultural workers left farm for factory. The shortage worsened after the United States declared war in late 1941. Everywhere in rural America, from dairy farms to cattle-feeding operations, from Corn Belt hog lots to rural Georgia chicken coops, labor vanished. When labor cannot be found, humans make a logical decision: they replace it with machinery. Americans had a long-standing tradition of doing so. For most of the nineteenth century, for example, the country suffered chronic shortages of labor that fostered a national passion for mechanization and automation. So, too, in the 1940s. Factory farming already had plenty of support both in and out of agriculture, and World War II affirmed that enthusiasm. Nowhere was this more true than in the broiler industry.
Faced with record demand on one hand and lack of labor on the other, Jesse Jewell tightened his control over the broiler-making process. Back in the 1930s, his growers had cobbled together coops from scraps of brick, sheet metal, or wood. Now Jewell required them to replace those with purpose-built structures outfitted with electricity and automated feeding and watering systems, buildings that contained thousands of chickens housed in long rows of stacked wire cages. Jewell helped his growers finance those improvements: he borrowed from a local bank and then reloaned funds to growers. He replaced verbal agreements with written contracts that gave him outright ownership of chicks and required farmers to use feed supplied by him. He based payments on the growers’ efficiency as measured by the number and size of birds they raised per pound of feed. Other Georgia broiler makers made the same decisions, and similar contracts ruled in burgeoning poultry industries at Delmarva and in Arkansas and other (mostly southern) states. The change unnerved some observers. A poultry extension agent at the University of Delaware feared that Delmarva growers did not understand the implications of these arrangements. As long as they could pay for feed “and have a few dollars left,”
they “figure they are making a little profit,” he complained. They seemed not to realize that their profit had been earned at the expense of interest payments on debt. But faced with relentless demand—and, of course, the potential for profit—integrated poultry production built on the factory model became entrenched.
The processing side of the equation changed, too. When Jewell signed contracts
to supply chicken to military buyers, he also agreed to meet federal regulations in his factory. The contracts mandated, for example, that carcasses be subjected to a high-temperature scald and that he ship packaged, precut pieces rather than whole birds. Eventually the War Food Administration decided that federally purchased poultry must be shipped frozen. All of it required Jewell to redesign his plant and to invest in processing, packaging, sanitizing, and cooling equipment. It wasn’t cheap: the required scalding machinery increased production costs by 50 percent, forcing Jewell to compensate by reducing expenses elsewhere in his facility. But here again, Jewell got help: USDA and military staff provided engineering expertise and ensured that equipment manufacturers, already burdened by war demands and materials shortages, honored nonmilitary contracts such as those from broiler processors. Faculty at land grant schools and extension programs contributed research in the form of new freezing techniques, for example, and disease management strategies. The assistance infuriated small operators who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) shoulder the necessary expense. One man complained that the system was “arranged to help
big business and discourage little business.” He was right: the USDA, military buyers, and land grant experts encouraged large-scale, efficient, machine-based production as a way to manage the paradox of plenty and to produce food as inexpensively as possible. By war’s end, broiler production had become a highly mechanized, science-based, integrated industry. The results were extraordinary: In 1939, Georgia producers put 1.6 million chickens on the market, well up from the 400,000 they had raised in 1934. In 1945, they sent nearly 30 million to market.
But labor wasn’t the only shortage that afflicted agriculture during the war. Everyone who raised livestock, whether chickens, cattle, or hogs, struggled with feed supplies that ranged from scarce to nonexistent. Corn, for example, was in short supply. So, too, were fish meal and cod liver oil: Americans had long imported the former from Japan and the latter from Norway. The Nazi invasion of Norway and the bombing of Pearl Harbor closed supply routes. The results were predictable: farmers spent more to feed livestock, and the relatively scrawny animals they took to market yielded less meat and translated into higher prices at grocery stores. (That, by the way, was one rationale for wartime price controls on meat: without them, retail prices would have soared and shoppers would have raised hell—the last thing any politician wanted, especially those who remembered the food riots that preceded American entry into World War I.) Unless Americans could find substitutes for conventional feedstuffs, warned one official, a “serious bottleneck”
would eliminate meat from many tables and from camps on the front lines. Those shortages led directly to the use of antibiotics in livestock production.