Playing Chicken

September 30, 2024 1:05 PM

"With just four companies controlling over half of poultry production in the country, chicken processors have been able to collude to suppress wages, fix prices and retaliate against farmers who speak out. Poultry growers have little recourse when Big Chicken gives them a raw deal...Since President Biden signed an executive order promoting competition in 2021, this administration has done more to level the playing field for chicken farmers than any in recent memory — but you wouldn’t know it from listening to stump speeches."

"In 2022, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit alleging that Sanderson Farms and Wayne Farms, two chicken processors, engaged in deceptive practices that arbitrarily reduced farmers’ pay, eventually winning reforms to a hated system that landed many farmers in unsustainable debt. Last year, the Justice Department stopped Koch Foods from charging family farms a crippling “exit” fee when they wanted to stop raising chickens for the company.

"And this year, the Department of Agriculture is rolling out rules to give teeth to the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, a law that is supposed to protect farmers and ranchers from collusion and abuse but has rarely been enforced."

These efforts could be popular in rural areas ... if only rural people knew about it (and weren't coached to distrust The Media and The Government). And, of course, if Big Ag didn't have the power to repeatedly kill regulations it doesn't like.

posted by zenzenobia (15 comments total)

I'm all for putting a crimp in Big Chicken.

I don't even buy the regular stuff they sell at grocery stores anymore. It's all these gigantic oversized breast pieces, with rubbery meat that doesn't even really smell like chicken once you cook it.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:07 PM on September 30 [10 favorites]

Thank you for sharing this! The bullying and hardball tactics (of Koch and others) is stunningly retrograde.

“They let us sink,” John Ingrum, a poultry grower in Mississippi who lost his farm after testifying at one of those hearings, told me. “When I got back from the hearing, there was a note stuck on my gate,” he told me. “It said, ‘You’re done.’” He never again received a batch of chicks from Koch Foods. He couldn’t pay off his loans and his farm went into foreclosure.

posted by spamandkimchi at 3:39 PM on September 30 [7 favorites]

Because I've been mildly obsessed with the concept of monopsony, I looked up "monopsony" + "chicken farm" and found these articles:

As Tyson Foods Inc. has tightened its grip on the poultry industry in Arkansas over the last four decades, the state has lost nearly half of its poultry farms. (2021)

Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat processor, reported that its chicken prices rose 20 percent in the first quarter of 2022—while profits rose by a staggering 48 percent during that same time. And Tyson isn’t alone: The industry overall is reporting unusually high profits. Last quarter, Pilgrim’s Pride, owned by JBS, saw profits increase by 124 percent. (2022)
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:43 PM on September 30 [7 favorites]

So the article doesn't really answer the question it asks. Why isn't the Harris campaign highlighting this then? Is there some other voting block being harmed by this that they don't want to lose? Presumably they already don't have the votes of the executives at the 4 chicken companies, so it's not about them. If it's not the chicken consumers, who the articles implies would also benefit from less oligopoly, then who is it?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:58 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

everything's so f---ed it's hard to make a blanket priority list?
posted by torokunai at 4:03 PM on September 30 [5 favorites]

Opposing Big Ag is like opposing Big Oil.

Actually, CF Industries is both.

But you see Harris folding on fracking
(which makes the fertilizer, which makes feed which makes the chicken)

So why would the democrats kick one bear, when they are avoiding kicking the other?
posted by eustatic at 4:04 PM on September 30 [5 favorites]

But what's weird is that it sounds like they ARE kicking the bear. They're just not taking any credit for it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:09 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

There s electoral politics, and then there is policy

Seems pretty clear to me
posted by eustatic at 4:14 PM on September 30 [2 favorites]

Only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have ever run national electoral campaigns on their actual policies

Biden ran on Build Back Better, and then we didn't pass it, even though what was passed was considerable, it wasn't what was campaigned on

Given Citizens United, I don't see this changing soon.
posted by eustatic at 4:16 PM on September 30 [2 favorites]

Also, as long as Fox News persists, asking candidates to run on their policies is going to receive a lot of blowback from campaign professionals who have to deal with the other side campaigning on racist fictions, and having a television empire which will reliably spread such racist fictions

The media environment is flooded with campaign shit, especially for the next handful of weeks

I honestly would not take any statement by any national candidate that seriously during this time. at this time, all campaigns are targeting some very very low information constituencies, and that means communications are going to get real stupid.


Let s end Citizens United. End Fox News, or maybe restructure campaigns to be more like the Sanders or Warren campaigns. Which, given the fact that neither ever won, is going to be a challenge to convince campaign apparatuses to do
posted by eustatic at 4:26 PM on September 30 [9 favorites]

When democrats help rural white people, those people get bitter about it, thank republicans and spit on the democrats, or worse. See obamacare, see all the tax subsidies, see public education, all the infrastructure jobs etc

We didnt take the beaches at normandy by helping the german defenders get cheaper insulin. You can't nice your way out of prison or slavery or the trench.

Sometimes I wonder if democrats realize they are losing the war. Sometimes I wonder if democrats even realize they are in a war. You know wolves don't actually operate alone.

well, that's enough hyperbolic internetting for one day. Enjoy the purge. He promised it would just be one day, so we got that going for us.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 7:06 PM on September 30 [3 favorites]

We didnt take the beaches at normandy by helping the german defenders get cheaper insulin. You can't nice your way out of prison or slavery or the trench.

I have no idea where you’re going with this, but WWII was won without ever making nice with ideologically differing allies is quite the opening gambit.
posted by zamboni at 9:37 PM on September 30 [9 favorites]

Elsewhere, same feathers, same tale. For a chunk of the 00s we were leveraging the chicken genome to understand their immune system and make it safer for human consumption [keyword Campylabacter]. It was government funded research, but early on we lunched the Chairman of the country's largest chicken slaughterer: looking for industry co-funding of the work. ThenIL that their health & safety handwashing instructions were printed in 26 different languages! That's all I needed to hear to know that working at the chicken coal-face was brutal hard work that only the most desperate New Irish would consider. But chicken is cheap, so --
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:22 PM on September 30 [2 favorites]

"Lets go back to Marshall Durbin and hang some mo' chickens"
posted by torokunai at 7:46 AM on October 1

It's World Dairy Expo week here in Madison, WI, and I'm in the industry. After more than 20 years in the livestock sector I still don't really understand the way farmers vote. If the Trump administration had cost me billions as a direct result of his tariffs I don't think I'd be so keen on the guy, but I also didn't get bribed receive "market facilitation" payments. A lot of folks at Expo this year are angry because the Trump campaign wanted to have a campaign rally at the event but were told no. I expect to overhear a lot of things this week I have to pretend I didn't. The dairy industry doesn't yet have the kind of vertical integration that gives the poultry companies the power they have over chicken farmers, but there are certainly those who want that to change.
posted by wintermind at 8:47 AM on October 1 [3 favorites]