"Chickens and turkeys raised for eggs and meat live nasty, brutish, and short lives—a fact that has long been known to animal-welfare advocates and farmers, if not the omnivorous public. Breeding is a major reason. Birds destined for grocery stores and fast-food outlets are franken-creatures that balloon in size at a metastatic rate: If people grew as fast as a broiler chicken did, they would weigh nearly 700 pounds by the time they were two months old. These overgrown chickens and turkeys do not act much like chickens and turkeys at all. Many spend their lives standing in filth, their bodies ammonia-scarred, their organs strained, their bones broken.
The system that breaks their bones is a model of industrial efficiency—and that is where the problems for the farmers come in, too. A century ago, most farmers ran independent businesses. They built their barns and chicken houses to their own specifications. They bought animals, supplies, and feed from a range of suppliers. They contracted with slaughterhouses and processors to get their birds to market.
Today, the industry is dominated by just a handful of vertically integrated companies, known as integrators. These mega-producers, such as Tyson and Perdue, contract with farmers to raise their birds for them. The farmers take on loans to build warehouses to the precise specifications of the integrators. They raise the birds according to the precise specifications of the integrators. And finally, they are compensated according to how well the integrators judge their performance.
This efficiency has led to plentiful, cheap meat and eggs. But it has immiserated the farmers. They have little say in how they run their own farms, acting primarily as functionaries. They have little way to differentiate their products or improve their margins. They take on significant financial risk, with contract chicken farmers working off $5.2 billion in debt as of 2011."
The Human Cost of Chicken Farming
| | The Human Cost of Chicken FarmingAnnie Lowrey Industrial efficiency has led to plentiful, cheap meat and eggs, while immiserating farmers. |
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Soup's On! And On! Thai Beef Noodle Brew Has Been Simmering For 45 Years
Has Deadly Blast Fishing Finally Met Its Match?
"It’s easy to see the appeal of blast fishing. Within seconds, the blast ruptures organs of schools of fish, leaving them gasping at the surface or plummeting to the bottom. But the easy catch comes with a steep price; future fishing grounds are destroyed, diving tourism dwindles, fishermen are injured and, in the worst cases, it can prove deadly. In July, two Chinese divers and their divemaster died in the waters off Sabah, allegedly after fish bombs were detonated nearby.
| | The Turning Tides of New England Fisheries | OZYOlivia Miltner Fishing families are discarding old strategies and turning to modern methods to help their industry survive. |
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The detection system Lim and his team have developed could prove a “game changer” in tracking blast fishing, he says. “Blast fishing has been occurring for many years, but we haven’t had the tool to locate it,” Lim says."
