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 (9 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 [2 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

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 [2 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

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 [1 favorite]

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

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