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But besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Here's an example of the progress that's been made already. Notice how breeding has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look at that drumstick. This bird was fattened in the same length of time and on the same amount of feed as the other one. Thank your own guess as to which is the more profitable to raise.
For much of America's history, chickens look different to the way they do today. They were thin, elegant, even slim and upright. The average bird weighed about two and a half pounds in the nineteen twenties, and chickens were raised differently too, on small farms and homesteads. The birds and their eggs provided a valuable source of extra protein and the occasional Sunday roast for millions of Americans.
But today chickens are front loaded feathered freaks. After years of commercial breeding, the weight of your run of the mill roaster has more than doubled to a chunky five or six pounds, way more than chickens of the past.
Chickens as our great grandparents would have understood them looked very different from chickens today. They were scrawny, they were rangier, they could move around a barnyard, and they could flap up into trees and avoid predators. And that's almost nothing
like the chickens that we eat today. So if you went back to the time of I guess our great grandparents, let's say, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people didn't eat chicken that and that seems very bizarre to us now in the era when there are a million forms of chicken nuggets in the cold case at the supermarket and there's a chicken sandwich on every corner. But chicken used to be kind of special.
Welcome to the second installment of Beat Capitalism, our add thoughts special series in which we are examining the US economy through the lens of chicken. If you haven't listened to our first episode where we talked about chicken prices and the consumer experience of eating chickens and eggs, you should definitely go back and do that.
In this episode, we're going to focus on the birds themselves and the people that grow them, because chicken actually has a lot to say about the structure of the labor market too, and the relationship between big companies and their workers. And a lot has changed from the backyard birds of yesteryear.
To understand what's happened to chickens and the people who grow them, it helps to consider where they started from. Maren McKenna is a journalist and author who specializes in public health, and she wrote a book called appropriately Enough, Big Chicken.
As we said, chickens used to be a lot. Smaller families might keep a few egg layers in their backyards, and once the birds reached the end of their laying life, they might be put in the proverbial pot. One key thing is that chicken meat, for a long time was a tree, not a stable.
Now.
As a rule, older chickens that have been running around a backyard don't usually taste as good. They're leaner, they're chewier, and there just aren't that many of them compared to today's industrial scale farming. But things started to change in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. To satisfy increased demand for chicken meat, farmers started scaling up and raising their birds in big chicken houses. We'll talk more about those in just a little bit.
In the nineteen forties, after the Second World War, something big happen on the way to Big Chicken.
To understand where the industrialization of chicken comes from, and after that the industrialization of almost all the other proteins that we eat, you really have to go back to the middle to the end of World War II, and a couple of things are happening at the same time. The first is that there's a war on and there's a lot of soldiers and sailors deployed around the globe who need to be fed, so there's a great deal
of pressure on meat producers to increase their production. Pressure that goes away when the war is over, and when that guaranteed market from the military forces suddenly vanishes, leaving them pretty over extended. The second is that immediately after World War two, kind of extraordinarily, there are a number of extreme weather events in growing areas around the globe.
There are typhoons, there are storms, and this is added to the destruction of growing areas that occurred during the war and the destruction of naval fleets and of fishing vessels. So there's both an over extension of meat production and also a sense of frigility of the food system.
It was against this backdrop the biologist Thomas Jukes entered the picture. With more and more chickens now being kept in big houses, the birds were no longer able to forage for bugs and grubs and graints on their own. They needed help to survive indoors, and that's where Jukes comes in.
Jukes was attached to a team that had produced the first antibiotic of the tetracyclines that we still use today. It was called oreomycin. He also happened to have been given an assignment to address the dietary needs of chickens because part of the issue of the meat industry feeling over extended after the end of World War II was
that they felt they needed to cut costs. This is actually the point at which we start entering in to the part of American agricultural history where livestock starts getting fed a lot of grain, but there was concern that grain didn't have a full nutritional profile, and so they were looking for inexpensive supplements, and in a very famous experiment, Jukes bought a whole bunch of baby chicks, divided them into groups gave each group some kind of supplement that
was available on the market at the time, cod liver oil,
synthesized vitamins, brewers yeast. To one group, he gave the ground up dried remains of the growing medium in which his company's drug had been made, oreomycin, and when he assessed the results of the experiment on Christmas Day in nineteen forty eight, he found that the chicks in his experiment who'd been given the oreomcein leftovers, had gained more weight than any other set of animals in the experiment, and from that recognition, an entire industry of giving an
biotics to animals began. Jukes called that effect growth promotion, and they filed for a patent for the.
So The introduction of growth promoters helped the birds survive the great indoors and get bigger. But that wasn't the last of the chicken revolution.
One was that chickens themselves changed physically, thanks largely to the US Department of Agriculture, which in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties sponsored a contest among chicken breeders called the Chicken of Tomorrow.
Help in developing the Chicken of tomorrow. You can't take it regretted that every hand is earning her keeper. Even though laying an egg ought to be easy for any.
Chicken, that's a few thing big twe.
Well.
Anyhow, the idea of.
The Chicken of Tomorrow contest was to make chickens meteor to produce a bird that would have more breast, that would have big enough to feed a family, which was kind of hard at that point for a four or five person family to eat one chicken and be satisfied, and also to be very predictable in a number of ways, to be a single breed. And after a couple of years of competition, the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest produced the prototype for the most of the chickens that are raised today.
Blocky muscles, white feathered, docile, not interested in running around a barnyard and flapping up into a tree, content to sit in one place.
So antibiotics and breeding helped turn the chicken of tomorrow into the chicken of today.
Well that's not quite all. Actually, a lot of things were happening on the chicken innovation front around that time.
The second thing that drove the difference between the Chicken of yesterday and the chicken of tomorrow is that we changed our orientation to how we eat chicken from buying birds that were whole and had to be roasted or cut up into pieces and had to be pan fried or broiled into a source of protein that was disassembled at the manufacturing level into things like nuggets, so that people could consume chicken without having to deal with the physical reality of a chicken.
It's hard to imagine a world without chicken nuggets now, but as Marin lays out, it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that these became a thing, and it was a very deliberate decision. After all, if you want to sell more chicken, you have to get people to eat more chicken, and one way of doing that is giving them more options to consume it. And then boom, the chicken nugget was born, and these little nuggets of chicken proved to be pure gold for some businesses like McDonald's McDonald's, Yes
and Joe. You might be surprised to find out that McDonald's didn't actually invent the chick and nugget. Here's Marin again.
So we all think of the chicken nugget as a creation of McDonald's, and certainly McDonald's would claim that the chicken nugget is their thing. Introduced in the late seventies, by nineteen eighty they were blowing the doors off in the McDonald's restaurants where they were sort of secretly introduced.
But it's pretty widely understood in the poultry industry that McDonald's shouldn't get all the credit because the prototype, the predecessor of the McDonald's chicken nugget, was actually invented by a kind of tinkereer scientist in a basement laboratory at Cornell University, a guy named Robert Baker, who was not primarily interested in chicken, but rather was interested in essentially
how to avoid food waste. And he was very troubled by how much of the carcass of a chicken goes to waste, and he wanted to find ways to use as much of the carcass as possible, as much of the meat on the carcass as possible. And he came up in this basement laboratory with a bunch of graduate students with things that we now take for granted in
supermarkets chicken, bacon, chicken cold cuts, chicken sausages. But his signature contribution to the future of chicken was a thing that he called the chicken stick, modeled some degree on fish sticks, which had been introduced about ten years earlier.
The chicken stick was chopped, formed, pressed chicken meat sucked off the bones, covered with a breaded coating, frozen and frozen in such a way that when you took it out of the freezer and fried it or baked it, the coating wouldn't disassemble from the rest of the meat. That was a kind of secret process that Baker invented, but it didn't stay a secret. It was released in an agricultural extension bulletin that Cornell published and sent all
over the country. They didn't in any way attempt to keep any ip in this, and as a result, the idea of something that looked like at chicken nugget was out there in the world, and seventeen years later out came the McDonald's snugget.
Suddenly a lot more of a chicken could be used, and thanks to antibiotics and breeding, there was more chicken around to sell.
One way to think about it is that raising chickens went from being a really small scale agriculture process to more of an industrial thing. There's a reason it's called factory farming, after all. The idea is to produce as much meat as you can at the lowest possible cost, and then use it as efficiently as possible. And to do that you need standardization, new technology in the form of growth promoters and scale.
I really think we can say that it's because of antibiotic use that we have the modern industrial scale meat production that we have today. Without that early use of antibiotics as growth promoters, no one would have understood that you could actually produce animals almost like widgets in a kind of Henry Ford model. And so once people moved to doing that, then it made sense for farms to
get larger and for profit to increase. And for farms to get larger, you had to protect animals against being held in more crowded conditions than they traditionally would have been in smaller open farms.
The upside of all of this is that we get plentiful white meat, all the stuff that goes into delicious sandwiches and convenient chicken nuggets. The downside is a lot of that comes at the expense of the animals themselves, and as we're about to see, also the farmers who grow them. There's another seminal moment in the transformation of America's chicken industry, one that has more to do with where they're grown and by whom.
In nineteen twenty three, a Delaware housewife by the name of Cecil long Steel by the way, great name, got a surprise in the mail. She had ordered fifty baby chicks, but the mailman came to her door with five hundred chicks instead.
Instead of sending the hundreds of extra chicks back in the mail, Cecil decided to make do. She kept them in a cardboard box and set about building a shed to house them. Over the next five months or so, she raised the chicks to adulthood, fattening them up and eventually selling them to local hotels and restaurants as a delicious meal. Then she decided to do it all over again. Soon she was ordering one thousand chicks, then ten thousand, and then she just kept going.
So what Cecil pioneered is the first broiler house, a big step in the history of poultry farming. Today, chickens are raised in huge barns that cost large amounts of money to build, and in order to keep these big barns filled with chickens, farmers have to participate in something called the tournament system.
In fact, everything about modern chicken is big. In the tournament system, farmers get baby chicks from large chicken breeders they're called integrators companies like Tyson, Purdue or Pilgrim's Pride, and then they raise them using feed and growth promoters sent to them by those same companies. Eventually, the mature birds are handed back to the chicken company that sold them as babies and they fulfill their chicken destiny of becoming sandwiches, nuggets, or other snacks.
Basically, what we do is we supply the buildings and the labor and all the stuff needed to actually raise birds for these big what they call integrators or chicken companies like a Tyson or Purdue. Tyson or Purdue actually owns the chicks, and they actually own the feed and vaccinations and that sort of thing.
Meet Craig Watts. He's a former contract poultry producer who raised chickens in North Carolina. As part of the tournament system.
We just basically get them on what lack of better terms, consignment there, there's just a few hours old. When we get them and we raise them up to market age. They give us some guidelines on doing that, and then they come pick them up, and then we get ready and start all over again.
It all sounds pretty simple and efficient, and the integrators themselves argue that they're basically taking on the messier, more difficult, and more capital intensive parts of the chicken business, like hatching chicks, transporting them back and forth to farmers, and then processing them into chicken nuggets and so on.
So that's the tournament system, but Craig Craig calls it something different.
Basically, what it boils down to is who can get the chicken to the plant the quickest, Who can get that chicken the fattest on the least amount of feed least amount of feed meaning least amount of cost. So and that sounds perfect. I mean, you figure things out, you grasp concepts, you tweet things, do what you have to do, and if you work smarter and you work harder than the next guy, you're gonna get compensated a little more perfect.
Right.
The problem is, there's the flaw in this whole tournament system scenario. I call it thunder doom. It's ten men enter and five men leave. Because every week, if you have ten growers go out, you're gonna have some that make at or above the base pay, which is my base pay, well I think was around five cents a pound at that time. Then you're going to have five or so out of the ten that are at base or below. Right, so they take the bonuses to the five growers that are above average, is taking the pay
of the growers that are below average. So for the company, it's a zero sum game. They're only going to have a nickel invested in a pound. A pie, so to speak, is finite. The size of the pie is finite. The farmer is fighting for the slice.
So in the tournament system, you're basically graded on a curve. If you're a chicken farmer who does well relative to other growers in the area, you'll get more money from the pot, and the ones who do badly you get less money from the same pot. So you want to be ranked higher relative to other growers.
When Craig decided to become a farmer, heating against his fellow chicken growers for pay wasn't quite what he had in mind. In fact, let's go back to how Craig got into the chicken business in the first place, back when he saw a big opportunity when Purdue started building a processing plant just seven miles south of his home.
They were looking for farmers to contract. We had to build buildings to raise their birds. I saw advertisement in the paper. I called the representative. We had a meeting. He gave me an income and expense kind of pro form a sheet. It wasn't get rich quick. I took it to my accountant. He cash floated there again. It was steady, but it wasn't get rich. But it was enough. And the guy at farm Credit was excited about the
possibility of poetry moving the entire area. He told me it was the best thing that might be the best thing that ever happened to farm in Robinson County.
So there was Things went okay at first. Craig spent his days monitoring his birds, making sure they weren't overheating or getting sick, or eating too much or too little, basically following the instructions and the chicken growing rules sent by Perduit.
Well, the first thing I would do, I would wake up and I would go and I would open all the houses up and I would just basically stick my head in the look and then I would and then we had a control room that the monitor things from, and I would make sure that the controller was set properly. They call it a computer, but it's basically a glorifly thermostat basically where you can control all the temperature settings, fan settings, that kind of stuff from a central location.
So I would I would look at all that and make sure everything was right, you know, take a sniff test, you know, is ammonia up, is it good? You know? Is the house too humid? You know? And what did the birds look like? Are they spread out comfortable? Are they active or are they just huddled up? Or are they panting? I mean, it was just it was just a lot of observations. Initially I would have to run to kids to school, but then when i'd come back,
the next thing I would do. I'd actually physically walk through the houses and I would look for birds that had died or maybe were deformed, or just maybe weren't performing as they should. Either I pick up the dead or we would have to call out and just just a nice word for kill birds that weren't going to make it the entire six weeks, you know, for whatever reason.
But there was a limit to what Craig could do for his flock. After all, the integrators are the ones sending him the baby birds themselves. They owned the chickens, and they're the ones making decisions about what they eat, what medicines they get, what conditions they're kept in, and how much room they have to grow up in.
The deal was is each of my houses were twenty thousand square feet. Well, they put thirty thousand birds in every house, so when those chickens were they had the same amount of space all the time. But when they got market age, I mean it was walled a wall in to end, just a sea of white chickens. So if you do the math, thirty thousand chickens and twenty thousand square feet is zero point sixty seven square foot per bird. So there's issues within the structure of the
system that I had no control over that. It's not cruel, but it's not about quality of life for an animal by any means. It's about homogenizing a widget and getting it to the plant. These chickens traits have been selected over the years. The word that what they are. The Americans desire for white meat is what drove what we call the frankin chicken. The breast is very large, it's oversized compared the rest of his body. They do have
trouble standing and they're very docile. They're not a hearty breed. I mean, they're bread to just barely stay alive long enough to get to the plant. So what they do is they take a bite of feed, they take a drink of water. They sit down. I called it three steps and flop boom, boom, boom boom, sit down. That's what they do all day.
In two thousand and eight, Craig reached a tipping point frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chicken.
Sentence say that ten times fast yo.
Frustrated by a particularly feeble flock of floppy chickens, he filmed the conditions in his own chicken house and uploaded them to YouTube to send to his production manager at Purdue. Soon after, he partnered with a reporter and an animal rights activist produce an expose on chicken farming.
Craig has no control over the health or genetics of the chicks that are delivered to him by Purdue. Bound by contract, Craig is not even allowed to give them sunshine or fresh air. Just thirty seven days later, they are a sea of panting birds. Panting indicates birds are overheated. These birds find it too painful to bear the weight of their unnaturally large breasts on their legs.
Craig Watts ultimately prove to be something of a renegade.
For its part, a Produced spokeswoman said it works with over eighteen hundred poultry farmers and the retention rate with those contracts is around ninety eight percent. In a statement to odd Lats, they also said it's been nearly ten years since Watts was a farmer for Purdue, and in that time it has established farmer advisory councils to gather important feedback and insights from them on how the company can improve.
But Craig's complaints about the imbalance of power in the poultry industry and the health of the birds are things that come up again and again in our conversations with chicken farmers. For instance, Karen Crutchfield, she goes by Susie, was a contract grower for Tyson for many years, but she started out raising cows.
We already had a cattle farm, and so we wanted to kind of expand out and add something else, some more income coming in. The difference in farming cattle and farming chickens is farming cattle, you own all the inputs. You own, the cattle get you on the feed. You decide what type of cattle you're going to buy. You decide what time they leave your farm, You decide the breeding periods. All of it is decided, but you and
you are a truly independent cattle farmer. You're independent. You don't have nobody giving you orders or telling you what you need, what size, what kind of feed. With chickens, it's totally different. With chickens. You have no control over any of the inputs. They deliver the chickens at third time, they give them the feed that they want them to have,
They pick them up on their time. They tell you what to do in controlling the inputs in the house, what temperature it needs to be, what size you need to let them out into full house. They control all of the inputs. You were only a serf more or less. You just have to do what they tell you. And actually it's more like your employee of theirs.
So for Susie, following the instructions of the chicken integrator was a must because if you don't, you risk losing out on that contract and you might not have any other companies to sell chickens too.
For poltry goers, there is no option of going independent because there's nothing you can do with your barns except raised chickens for Tyson or whatever integrator as the occasion had to be. In my area, Tyson was the only company in the area that we could go to. So if your houses was shut down, they were just shut down. You had nowhere else to go or anything else you could do with your barns other than maybe put hay in them. That was the only option you had. You could not grow chickens in them.
Again, the barns are really expensive and the farmers are often on their own when it comes to building them, even though the integrators may be the ones asking for improvements, which is exactly what happened to Susie.
Tyson Food started doing upgrades probably in the mid nineties, and each time they decided to do an upgrade, it kept costing more money. It was bigger upgrades than before, and so the last upgrade that they called for us to do was in twenty ten. They sent a letter out saying that we had to do all of these upgrades.
One of the upgrades that they requested us to do at the time was add two extra royal lights, just one massive upgrade, and it was going to end up costing us over three hundred thousand dollars to upgrade, and that would actually cost on the two older houses that were built in eighty seven, it was going to cost us more than we had originally built the houses for them for. And so at that point we said, no,
we're not going to do any more upgrades. The incentive for Tyson to ask for upgrades is keep the grower in debt. As long as the grower's in debt, they're going to do exactly what Tyson tells them. If they get out of debt, then they have more freedom to say no, I don't want to do that, and I'm not going to do that. And if they catch you off, then you've got everything paid for. But if you're a million dollars in debt and going to lose your home, you're more likely to do what they say.
A Tyson spokesperson did respond for comment. When we reached out, they said, and I quote, Foods contracts with a network of thousands of independent growers across the country, and we value the contributions that these growers make to our business. We depend on growers, and the contracts we have in place incentivized growers to raise high quality birds.
One contract grower who did lose it all is Michael Diaz. The Diasas used their life savings to put down a deposit on fifty acres of land back in twenty eighteen, with a home and four chicken houses. It was supposed to be agricultural bliss.
Farming was something that I had always dreamed of doing, but it wasn't something that I saw as being very feasible to do given the monetary constraints. I mean, you need a large piece of property. You needed to make a lot of capital investments to get into any kind of farming. The magnitude of what we had bought didn't sink in. But there were other farmers in the area. They weren't poultry farmers, but some of them knew of
some poultry farms. They were friends with some of these guys, and there was always this kind of this thought process that these guys that own these poultry farms that you know, these barns are fifty by five hundred feet long, and some of them bigger than that. You know, you always felt like they were because they had a lot of capital investments. You thought they must have had good cash flow,
they must have been living good lives. They were in contract with some of these household brands that you see on every grocery store shelf that you tend to start trusting, right you see these names. You know, I'll pick on others. You know, you see a name like Heinz Ketchup, or you see a name like Hormel or whatever. What I'm trying to allude to is you see these brands that have been in your face year after year from childhood
to adulthood, a staple in our food system. Say you tend to trust these brands or doing the right thing.
But Michael's integrator kept asking for more investments, and he struggled to keep up on this loan payment. Michael thinks he spent something like one hundred thousand dollars on unexpected upgrades in just two years.
I kept thinking that this is just going to sink me deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into debt. This dream of me being able to pay this place off and eventually build something that's generational for my family is not going to exist, and I said, I'm not doing it.
Michael Diaz ended up selling the farm, losing his life savings in the process. He later sued his integrator, arguing that chicken farmers in the tournament system should be classified as employees of integrators instead of independent contractors. That litigation is still pending.
Susie Crutchfield filed for bankruptcy and is still paying off her debt. Interestingly, Craig Watts didn't lose his chicken farming contract with Purdue after filming his barns, but the relationship obviously soured. Craig filed a whistleblower complaint Purdue countersuit that's pending too.
All three of them are now part of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project SRAP, where they work on a contract Grower Transition program, which aims to help poultry farmers navigate the thunderdome and the pile of manure, both figurative and literal, that comes with it. Here's Michael Diez again.
The person that has all the risk, all the liability is the farmer. He's the one that's in debt for these barns. He's the one that's in debt for all the facilities, the upgrades, the equipment. He's the one that's in debt that he's got to figure out, what in the world do I do with all this manure that I have here on this on this site. I've got to get rid of at half of them have nothing that they can do with it. Everything that is that
is a liability the farmer has. The integrator is the only one that's got anything that's able to build a profit.
That is not the sound of chickens, clearly, but I promise it will be relevant in a second contract growers in the poultry world carry most of the potential downside risks of chicken farming, while big chicken the integrators, enjoy most of the upside. They hog the benefits and pass on the risks, and that model is becoming more common, as the state of pig farming in Iowa shows.
At any given time, there are some twenty eight million hogs being raised in Iowa, making it America's biggest pig farming state, Iowa now produces nearly a third of America's total hog supply.
And speaking of manure, Iowa's pig population and what it produces has become a big debate. People generally don't want to live next to big pig farms for obvious reasons, and huge lagoons of manure can get into the water supply. One analysis of USDA data shows that the manure produced by Iowa's pigs has grown by almost eighty percent between twenty two and twenty twenty.
Austin Ferk is also a member of the SRAP. He's an agricultural Ana Trust expert who grew up in Iowa had a front row seat to the state's transformation to prime pig territory.
As Austin points out, Iowa's pork industry didn't always look like this. Modern pig producers took a lot of inspiration from you guessed it, chickens.
What you saw happened in the eighties is a state senator deregulated the pork industry in North Carolina to allow the industrialization of pork production, copying that model chickenization, where he owned the animal. He had other people and these metal sheds. You'd give them his pigs, they would grow them out, and then he would sell them, butcher them,
what have you. The business elite in Iowa saw what was happening in North Carolina and they saw the massive production increase is going on there, and they were like, we're not going to lose our number one status. We're going to gauge in this race to the bottom.
And actually there's a name for this trend, chickenization.
We are going to chickenize the pork industry in Iowa, and if we have to kill the family farm, so be it, because it's all about selling more quarancy the whole supply chain around it, maintaining that dominance instead of having chicken behave like the other industries. It became a
race to the bottom chickenization. Everything is being chickenized, where you just apply this really abusive power structure to different modes of commodity production because it shifts the riskiest part to the worker and the corporate shareholders get the upside of it.
And that's arguably helped big Chicken just get bigger. Chicken is now dominated by large commercial breeders and processors. With a handful of companies commanding sixty percent of the US chicken market, the.
Chicken industry is pretty concentrated. It's not even just the concentrate of slaughtering the animal, it's the whole supply chain. The whole goal of the company is from the genetics of the thing that hatches to the chicken tenders eating the store. That whole thing has been highly vertically integrated.
So chickens have grown fatter, more horizontal. At the same time, the chicken industry as a whole has become more concentrated, more top down, more vertical, more powerful in terms of what they can extract from farmers and their birds. And that business model is spreading across agriculture and even beyond.
Right.
You know, people think of companies like Uber as pioneering some novel business model, but the rise of independent contractors with more risk being foisted on people who resemble employees is a large and growing phenomenon.
Next up on beat capitalism, what can be done to tip the balance of power back towards consumers and workers. It's time to talk about unclucking the system.
Beat Capitalism is written by Tracy Alloway, Carmen Rodriguez and Joe Wisenthal.
This short series was produced and edited by Carmen with the help of Kale Brooks and Dashel Bennett.
The fact checking of industry puns and other information was brought to you by Dash and Kale.
The chickenization of our regular All Blocks theme song and the mixing is done by our sound engineer, Blake Maples.
Brendan Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's Head of Podcasts.
Special thanks to Compassion.
In World Farming and if you enjoyed this deep dive into the chicken industry, please consider leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.
This episode has been updated to reflect a clarification. It wasn't until twenty thirteen that Craig Watts sent a film of his barnes to his production manager. In twenty fourteen, he partnered with a human rights activist and journalist to produce a documentary on chicken farm um