The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness

124 Pages·2017·0.857 MB·English

by  Monica Gisolfi

Th e Takeover
series editor
James C. Giesen, Mississippi State University
advisory board
Judith Carney, University of California– Los Angeles
S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia
Robbie Ethridge, University of Mississippi
Ari Kelman, University of California– Davis
Shepard Krech III, Brown University
Megan Kate Nelson, www .historista .com
Tim Silver, Appalachian State University
Mart Stewart, Western Washington University
Paul S. Sutter, founding editor, University of Colorado, Boulder
Th e Takeover
chicken farming and the
roots of american agribusiness
Monica R. Gisolfi
Th e University of Georgia Press
Athens
Parts of this book appeared previously as “Leaving the Farm to Save the Farm: Poultry
Farmers, Contract Farming, and the Necessity of ‘Public Work,’ 1950–1970,” by Monica R.
Gisolfi , in Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace since 1945, edited by
Robert Cassanello and Colin J. Davis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 64–79,
and are reprinted with the permission of the University Press of Florida; chapter 1 appeared, in
a diff erent form, as “From Crop Lien to Contract Farming: Th e Roots of Agribusiness in the
American South, 1929–1939,” by Monica Richmond Gisolfi , in Agricultural History 80, no. 2
(Spring 2006), 167–89.
© 2017 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gisolfi , Monica R., author.
Title: Th e takeover : chicken farming and the roots of American agribusiness / Monica R.
Gisolfi .
Description: Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2017] | Series: Environmental history and
the American South | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2016039446| isbn 9780820335780 (hard bound : alk. paper) | isbn
9780820349718 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780820349459 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Poultry industry—Georgia—History. | Poultry industry—United States—
History. | Agricultural industries—United States—History. | Agriculture—Economic
aspects—United States—History.
Classifi cation: lcc hd9437.u63 g445 2017 | ddc 338.1/ 76200973—dc23 lc record available at
https:// lccn.loc .gov/ 2016039446
To Peter A. Gisolfi
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contents
Foreword, by Paul S. Sutter ix
Acknowledgments xv
introduction 1
chapter 1 From Cotton to Chicken, 1914– 1939 5
chapter 2 World War II and the
Command Economy, 1939– 1945 23
chapter 3 Taking Over: Integrators and the Birth
of the Modern Broiler Industry 38
chapter 4 Broiler Sharecroppers and Hired Hands 50
chapter 5 From Public Nuisance to
Toxic Waste, 1940– 1990 63
epilogue 71
Notes 73
Index 101
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foreword
For almost a decade, I lived in Athens, Georgia, and taught at the University of
Georgia, and during that time I became deeply interested in the environmen-
tal history of the American South. Much of that interest was academic and
bookish, but because environmental literacy begins with the local, I also spent
a lot of time interrogating the landscape around me. Several things piqued my
interest, including how extensively reforested the Piedmont had become after
its long and damaging experience with cotton culture, and how, without much
eff ort, one could locate beneath that mantle of trees the ghosts of soil erosion
past. But I also had a series of memorable brushes with one of the region’s
dominant enterprises— industrial poultry production— that arose as cotton
was in retreat. Anyone paying attention to the landscape of northeast Georgia
in the early twenty-fi rst century cannot fail to sense the poultry industry’s
ubiquitous footprint.
My impressions came in pieces and took a while to cohere. One of my vivid
early memories was of attending my new faculty orientation and asking a col-
league sitting next to me what department he was joining. “Poultry Science,”
he said, to my amazement. Until that moment, I had no idea there was such a
fi eld, let alone a whole academic department devoted (according to its website)
to providing “outstanding educational experiences for students and service to
poultry producers, poultry related businesses and the general public through
the discovery, verifi cation and dissemination of relevant, science- based knowl-
edge.” uga’s cutting edge Poultry Science program arose explicitly to serve that
state’s industrial poultry producers.
Soon thereafter, we settled into a beautiful house in a tree- lined neighbor-
hood whose only drawback, we discovered, was an occasional putrid smell
that wafted from the poultry processing plant less than a mile to the north
of us. When I drove my children to their preschool, we passed right by that
processing plant, and on the other end of our journey we drove right past a
chicken feed mill as well. Th ere weren’t any hatcheries along this particular
route, but there were several in other parts of town that I soon noticed. To-
gether, hatcheries, feed mills, and processing plants composed the key compo-
nents, the holy trinity, in the industry’s vertical integration. And always there
were dead chickens squashed fl at on the feeder roads, birds that had perished
{ ix }