Big Pharma, Big Oil, Now There’s Big Chicken: The Monopoly of the Poultry Industry

Most New Yorkers’ first encounter with chicken is with the frozen nuggets at the store or the questionable-looking ones in the school cafeteria. A trip to the petting zoo or farm is likely the closest we will get to the food production industry. Additionally, consumers often don’t observe the behind-the-scenes farming conditions when completing their grocery lists. Especially in the city, consumers are far removed from the agricultural industry. The monopoly of the poultry business is masked by mergers and branch corporations, which further complicates the issue of what’s actually ethical to regular buyers. 

Big Pharma and Big Oil have plagued consumer markets for years, and now there’s Big Chicken. Although boycotting these corporations is likely ineffective and unrealistic, awareness of the matter as well as recognizing deceptive claims can better equip consumers in their purchasing choices. Recognizing monopolies can help consumers become more conscious of their spending as well as where their food really comes from. 

First, most chicken farmers in the United States get their eggs from five corporations: Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Koch Foods, and Perdue Farms. These five control more than half of the $50 billion worth of chicken raised, processed, and sold annually in the United States. Furthermore, these corporations make up the poultry industry by employing thousands of factory workers and farmers across the United States. Notoriously, they have had several factory complaints, including using children for cheap labor, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination against farmers. 

John Ingrum, a Black farmer, alleged that Koch Foods’s employees called Black farmers the n-word. When he presented evidence of Koch Foods’s employees’ racist attitudes towards Black farmers, Koch Foods denied all wrongdoing and terminated his contract. To make matters worse, Ingrum caught the corporation consistently under-providing him with chicken feed. Another Black farmer, Carlton Sanders, was given a 23-item list of upgrades to make—a total of $318,000 in loans. He was the sole African-American farmer under contract with Koch Foods out of 173 farmers in Mississippi. He was also the only farmer who had gotten the list of updates. This led to a dispute with Koch Foods, who ultimately stopped supplying him with chickens altogether. Unfortunately, Sanders’s story didn’t have a happy ending: the bank foreclosed his farm. 

The way corporations work with farmers is that farmers enter contracts for a set amount of years. Farmers receive chicks, raise them, and send them back for slaughter. The farmers receive a set pay and also get paid for every chicken. All American farmers, who are critical to the country’s economy and food stability, are being taken advantage of by these corporations. For example, each corporation mandates certain infrastructure to take care of the chickens. This may include maintaining buildings and equipment or purchasing newer technologies for cultivation. The costs of these upgrades or purchases are paid for entirely by the independent farmers, meaning that they may have to take out loans. For instance, constructing just two new chicken houses costs about $1.5 million. If a farmer pays a mortgage on his farm and takes out more loans to pay for compulsory upgrades, he is further in debt. This debt trap ensures that farmers stay in the hands of the corporations—unable to speak out for fear of losing the rest of their income. Since they have invested in their farms, they can't risk leaving. In addition to these harsh conditions, some farmers have claimed that if they argue against the corporation, they would be punished with delayed shipment, ill chicks, or contract cancellation. Legally, the corporations can do this, and most farmers do not speak out for fear of losing their livelihoods. Furthermore, the chicks that the farmers receive are entirely dependent on the corporations. If the chicks are sick or weak, the farmers are left to deal with the consequences. The illness may spread around the farm, monetarily costing the farmer in the end. The corporations are fine with compensating the farmer less, since they supply farms across the country with hundreds of thousands of chickens. 

In addition, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, family farms accounted for 96 percent of all U.S. farms. Many individuals in the industry are generational farmers, and this affects them the most since they must pass down their business to their children, who will be forced to continue accepting these conditions. What’s worse is that chicken farmers sign contracts with these corporations in the first place because said corporations control the mass production of eggs and chicks. 

Additionally, corporations employ the tournament system, which includes farmers battling for wages. Essentially, a corporation collects the chickens to slaughter from each farmer and weighs them. Next, the corporation compares which farmer has cultivated the meatiest chicken in contrast with other farmers in the area. This discourages pay transparency and enhances harmful competition between farmers, leaving lower-ranking farmers with more debt since they’ll inevitably fail to raise the best chicken without the resources more affluent farms have. The alleged corruption comes from the fact that the corporation supplies all the chicks and can purposefully give out “dud coops.” The lower-ranking farmers may receive sicker chickens and will therefore be stuck at the bottom of the “tournament,” earning less money per chicken. This may be another way of enforcing discrimination since corporations take advantage of African-American farmers as well as any farmers who speak out against racism, mistreatment of chicks, food under-provision, or other issues.  

As a response to the presence of discrimination and power corruption in the poultry industry, the Packers and Stockyards Act, enacted in 1921, was supposed to ensure competition and fair trade practices in order to protect farmers and ranchers from large firms in the meat industry. Though the act was intended to regulate the livestock market in order to break down exploitative practices, the secretaries of agriculture in the years after the act’s enactment have failed to create specific regulations to reduce the power of large corporations. The meat industry also lobbied Congress to block stricter regulations by withholding funding from the United States Department of Agriculture. Neither Democratic nor Republican leaders have stopped mergers or curbed the corporations’ power to exploit farmers. The act’s failure to be enforced has exacerbated the monopolistic tendencies of these corporations and consequently left farmers in the dust. 

These business practices undermine the United States’s economic system by mistreating the core of the agricultural industry. Corporations take advantage of farmers in order to maximize profits. Consumers are often ignorant of this, and it can be difficult to boycott these firms because they are the main, and often, only suppliers of chicken. On an individual level, it is still important to support local farmers when possible. Farmers’ markets, which are available even in cities, are a great outlet to pick out local produce from smaller farmers, even if you must purchase meat from the supermarket. In the long term, it is up to the federal government to create stronger antitrust laws to ensure competition in the supermarket, which will prevent a handful of corporations from growing excessively powerful. The death of independent chicken farms signifies a dangerous monopoly that exploits small farmers and harms consumers across the country.