Blog Posts: Factory farms

By Tyler Shannon

Only Walmart can make headlines with a new policy not to sell consumers rotten produce. Just last week, Walmart announced a new “fresh produce guarantee” allowing consumers to get their money back if they’re unhappy with purchased produce that’s, presumably, old or expired. Walmart is not even asking customers to return the produce to get their money back, indicating that it already knows it may have a problem.

This initiative is clearly in response to recent discoveries that the company has been selling customers expired produce, which, according to analysts, is likely due to a severe reduction in the number of employees responsible for stocking shelves and checking on produce.

Once the news of the problem got out, instead of addressing the actual issue of not enough employees assigned to the task, Walmart set the PR machine into motion, trying to improve its image with consumers through yet another initiative, following other pledges to improve their environmental sustainability and food procurement.

However, what Walmart’s spin doctors aren’t broadcasting is that this new policy includes an insidious change in how the company deals with fruit and vegetable producers. Walmart, well known for putting intense pressure on its suppliers to cut costs, has eliminated the middle person in many cases and will now apply pressure directly to the farmers with which it does business. Walmart does not like to deal with multiple, small or even mid-sided suppliers, instead choosing to deal with a few huge suppliers for each product in order to maximize efficiency. The same will likely be true here, with Walmart turning to only the largest operations run by the biggest businesses in the fruit and vegetable industry.

In addition to its produce quality woes, a recent report released by the congressional House Committee on Education and Workforce showed problems outside the produce section. Analyzing state Medicaid and benefit records in Wisconsin, the congressional committee found that each Walmart superstore in the state was costing Wisconsin taxpayers a minimum of about $905,000 per year as a result of its low wages and minimal employee benefits, including, among other things, Medicaid, section 8 housing assistance, reduced price lunches, and food stamps. The analysis only counted actual enrollees in state services.

So much for the Walmart motto “Save Money. Live better.” It looks like Walmart is just talking about its corporate executives and top shareholders, not its employees or its customers.  

By Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards, Co-Director, Food & Water Justice

In yet another move to ensure the continuing degradation of waterways by our nation’s factory farms, the Environmental Protection Agency struck a deal with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Wednesday to significantly soften an earlier lawsuit settlement agreement that would have required the Agency to better regulate pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, across the country. The original settlement, entered into in 2010 after CBF filed a lawsuit for the Agency’s failure to implement the Clean Water Act (CWA) in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, called for EPA to strengthen its CAFO regulations.

While these industrialized agricultural facilities continue to be the highest source of pollution in many of our waterways, including the Chesapeake Bay, the new pact between EPA and CBF replaced the prospect of more protective regulations nationwide with weak provisions that generally require EPA to do the things that the Agency is already obligated to do (reviews of state permitting programs), along with inspections of a small handful of these polluting facilities in the Bay region. The new deal also focuses solely on the Bay watershed, thereby allowing EPA to continue to ignore every other waterway in the country.

EPA’s latest move follows on the heels of several other recent irresponsible CAFO pollution control approaches enacted by the Agency. In the summer of 2012 EPA abandoned a very basic information-gathering plan designed to better document the discharges that come from these factory farms. This Clean Water Act “308 rule,” which was implemented as part of a settlement agreement with environmental organizations who challenged the Agency’s 2008 CAFO regulations, was jettisoned after industry lobbyists browbeat the Agency into backing down.

Today, the largest polluters of waterways in the country remain largely unregulated and free to continue to discharge with impunity. Allowing EPA to avoid any kind of meaningful CAFO regulation is not going to result in cleaner waterways anywhere, and certainly not in the Bay. With the federal government refusing to do its job when it comes to CAFOs and water pollution, its critical that citizens continue to push EPA to do a better job on CAFO regulations and to demand that real steps finally be taken to address this persistent threat to our nation’s waterways.

Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive Director

By Wenonah Hauter

Last week, some people questioned our opposition to China’s largest meat company purchasing Smithfield, suggesting that it could be construed as xenophobia. But prejudice against a particular country has nothing to do with our concern. The globalized food system poses real food safety risks and free trade deals with global partners encourage a race-to-the bottom in food safety standards, leaving U.S. consumers at the mercy of inadequate foreign food safety systems like China’s.

We should all be leery of deals like this that further consolidate our food system; especially when they involve companies with a history of food safety problems and countries with abysmal track records for food and worker safety. The horrendous Chinese poultry plant fire currently making headlines provides another powerful example of how the factory farm model endangers lives.  

As I explain in this 2011 blog when we released our report, A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports from China, putting profits above people is a cross-cultural problem. Besides, many of the companies and investors profiting from Chinese exports are U.S. companies or investors (Goldman Sachs own part of Shuanghui International).

Anyone who’s paying attention knows that risky food from China has become all too common. Last month, Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats to discuss China as the leading producer of many foods Americans eat: apples, tomatoes, peaches, potatoes, garlic, seafood, processed food and food ingredients like xylitol and vitamin C.

As I explain on New York Times’ Room For Debate last night, the purchase of Smithfield isn’t just about exporting pork – it’s indicative of the American government’s fervor for exporting our consolidated, industrialized food system:

Shuanghui International became China’s monolithic meat company by adopting the U.S. factory farm model pioneered by companies like Smithfield. The merger is likely to increase the size, intensity and pollution of hog production in China. Furthermore, Smithfield’s anticipated increased exports to China would effectively convert U.S. factory farms into export platforms; Smithfield would ship out the pork, and we’d keep the hog manure.

In addition to the environmental consequences of the deal, it’s bad for consumers. Transnational deals in the food industry usually add to American imports, and a rising flood of imported food swamps U.S. import inspectors. In the long term, Shuanghui may offshore hog operations to China, and the U.S. could be importing pork. In 2011, Shuanghui recalled thousands of tons of meat after reports that it was laced with the banned veterinary drug clenbuterol, which is linked to serious human health risks.

Deals like this serve no one but the executives and bankers who stand to profit; everyone else is left with the manure.

(Read my full comment and the other experts’ perspectives here: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/02/smithfield-china-and-the-calculus-of-transnational-deals/food-industry-deals-hurt-consumers-and-the-environment)

Another debater, Thea Lee is the deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, brought up another excellent point:

If Chinese consumers want to consume American pork, they can presumably purchase it on the open market. Our farmers have been trying to get their pork into the Chinese market on a sustained basis for many years. The decision instead to purchase a major producer indicates that there are other motives. As we evaluate this and other similar investments, we had better have a good sense of how those other motives will impact good jobs, food safety and regulatory balance in this country. Unfortunately, under current law, even if we determine that this or similar investments would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy – or any subset of workers – there is very little we can do to stop it.

 We’re not criticizing the deal simply because Shuanghui is a foreign company. Food & Water Watch has criticized Australia’s and Canada’s food safety issues plenty. And if other country exporting food to the U.S. had the same food safety problems that China has, we would be equally concerned. The bottom line is further consolidation of our food system is bad for consumers and farmers. When a handful of companies—whether it’s Shuanghui or Tyson—control the food we eat, Wall Street and high-paid food industry executives win. Consumers, farmers and the environment all lose.

By Tim Schwab

Journalism and agriculture students at public universities, watch out.

Your administrators are laying out the red carpet for corporate junkets at a campus near you. With names like HungerU and Biotech University, these “educational” opportunities amount to little more than a slick propaganda campaign from biotech corporations.

DuPont Crop Protection (translation: herbicides and pesticides) is visiting universities in California and Arizona this week, wooing students with $2,500 grants and embarking on a mission to “educate college students about the significance of modern agriculture.” It’s called HungerU.

That’s a catchy name, but does a profit-driven chemical producer whose goal is to expand herbicide and pesticide sales really have much to offer students on the issue of food security? Something tells me its answer to hunger is more chemicals.

Meanwhile, Biotech U goes beyond the ag school to influence an entirely different set of future professionals: journalism students. Each year, the industry-friendly United Soybean Board partners with our nation’s journalism schools in an effort to “educate” future reporters about the role of biotechnology. The program includes all-expense paid gigs on agricultural reporting in exotic places like Turkey and China. This year, the winner goes to Italy. Who wouldn’t want a trip to Italy?

Noting that these future journalists will be “shaping the public’s perception of biotechnology in the coming decades,” Biotech U is part of a long-term strategic plan by the biotech industry to foster public acceptance of genetically engineered crops. The program also intends to “enlist future biotech advocates identified within university journalism programs to develop a draft program at other journalism schools.”

These insidious efforts by the biotech industry are a very small part of the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into academia from corporations, distorting the science and perverting the mission of higher education. Our public universities increasingly function like corporate laboratories—taking corporate research money to conduct experiments in corporate-sponsored laboratories, then publishing pro-industry findings in corporate-sponsored “scientific” journals.

Food & Water Watch detailed the ways in which industry is buying influence at our public universities in our report Public Research, Private Gain.

This new era of corporate influence is undermining intellectual freedom and academic independence. Professors that might otherwise pursue research that might challenge the bottom lines of biotech companies—for example, studying the negative health, environmental or economic effects of pesticides and biotech crops—simply choose not to for fear of losing future industry research funding or upsetting tenure-granting administrators. That means federal agencies writing the rules and regulations that govern biotech corporations often base their decisions on a body of science that only says industrial agriculture is safe, good and necessary.

Meanwhile, farmers that might want to want to pursue an alternative production model to agrochemicals, monocultures and factory farms have little research or academic support.

And students—our next generation of journalists, farmers and policy makers—graduate from schools that increasingly offer only the virtues of big business instead of teaching students to think critically about the dominant model of industrial agriculture or consider alternative solutions.

Don’t biotech and pesticide companies already have too much influence over our public universities? If you attend one of these schools, call your university administrators and tell them enough is enough.

By Eve Mitchell, Food & Water Europe

Click to see a larger image.

Watching UK’s National Farmers Union (NFU) President Peter Kendall testify to the UK Parliamentary Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ inquiry into horse meat contamination of the EU beef supply on March 5, I was struck again by the inconsistencies in the NFU approach when it comes to GM animal feed.

I have three questions for the NFU:

1) In his testimony, Mr. Kendall repeated the position that short supply chains are the answer to predictable control of our meat supply and regaining consumer confidence. How does this tally with the repeated insistence that UK livestock farmers need industrial GM feed from the Americas traded through complex international commodity markets?

Much is made about the allegedly dwindling availability of non-GM soy (known in the UK as soya), but the non-GM soya industry itself paints a rather different picture. On February 26, Augusto Freire, Managing Director of Cert-ID (a company certifying non-GM soya supplies), said, “20-25% of Brazilian soybean production is free from genetic modification for the 2012/13 crop. China’s and India’s soy production is 100% Non-GMO….Estimates for 2013 are strongly up compared to earlier years due to adoption of the CERT ID and ProTerra [non-GM certification] programs by new operators in Brazil, as well as increased demand in Europe.”

In the current climate, before supply and demand reduce the cost of non-GM feed, it may well be a bit more expensive per tonne, but according to our calculations if non-GM feed costs an extra £14/tonne (about $21.00), this works out to be a mere 3p/dozen eggs (about 5 cents). Mr. Kendall asks, “Are we going to produce chickens in this country that are non-GM, but buy them in from Asia because they are 20% cheaper and they are fed on GM [feed]?” Is he perhaps confusing feed costs with the poor animal husbandry that keeps meat from many non-European factory farms cheap?

We also need to be careful in working out how much animal feed is actually GM – any amount of GM feed comingled with an otherwise non-GM shipment means the entire quantity, and all subsequent feed bags, are labelled GM. This does not mean that feed is anything like 100% GM, and in fact the bulk of any animal feed is probably non-GM.

2) If, as Mr. Kendall says, UK farmers need “confidence” in the market to invest and improve UK beef production levels, why does this logic not apply to the farmers in Brazil already growing non-GM soya but unable to risk the costs of certification without confirmed advance orders from the EU to ensure they gets a return?

Augusto Freire notes, “An additional volume of Brazilian soy meal representing 1.5 million metric tonnes of soybeans could have been certified [as non-GM] if EU buyers had expressed their demand early in the year.” The non-GM soya is there, and more can be grown, we just need to say we want it. It’s not hard.

Consumer demand should boost confidence enough to take this step. A 2010 GfK/NOP poll showed fewer than 40% of supermarket shoppers were aware that imported GM animal feed fuels British factory farming, and 89% wanted these products to be clearly labelled. In January of this year the UK Food Standards Agency published research showing again that two-thirds of respondents want all use of GM feed to be labelled. Even among those undecided about GM food and crops respondents felt “some form of labelling should be in place to help them determine GM content and avoid choosing foods containing GM if they so wish”. Overall there is a clear indication this need to identify GM use applies to animal products in particular. People don’t want GM feed in the food chain, and they want clear labels to help them see where it is – or isn’t.

3) I completely agree that there is, as Mr. Kendall told the Committee, “too much focus on price” in the food industry. If this is the case, why are industrial crops feeding industrial megafarm production to produce cheap meat worthy of such vocal support?

True, there are vested interests on both sides of the discussion, and there are rumours that Indian soya is less desirable than Brazilian. Overall we’d be far better off moving away from the industrial meat model. Yet this does not explain why supermarkets can’t do their part in delivering what the market demands now by placing clear orders for non-GM soya (or non-GM fed products) to give Brazilian farmers the confidence they need to grow and certify non-GM crops. The NFU position invokes the market, but goes directly against the basics of supply and demand. The more non-GM feed is demanded, the more will be supplied, and the costs will come down—unless vested interests interfere with the market. Large supermarkets and dairies in other parts of Europe seem to be able to manage it, so it is very difficult to see why the UK is different.

Mr. Kendall told the NFU 2013 conference, “Today I want to talk about a pact with the great British consumer to get things changed…We now need supermarkets to stop scouring the world for the cheapest products they can find and start sourcing high quality, traceable, product from farmers here at home…That may mean more dedicated supply groups. It will certainly mean longer-term thinking and a shorter supply chain.” We agree, and we’re here to help.

Mr. Kendall, if you truly “Do not want food safety and standards to be politicised,” as you told the Committee, why do you say GM skepticism is “directly comparable to Nazi book-burning in the 1930’s”? Why do you not support your members in providing what the market clearly wants?

The situation with regard to GM animal feed looks increasingly like lucrative supply lines controlled by shippers and importers, not farmers, attempting to force an end to non-GM supplies on an unwilling market. The NFU position, which wedges farmers uncomfortably between their market and these vested interests, remains very difficult to understand. The sooner the NFU applies the logic it uses in the meat chain to the feed chain, the sooner consumers will begin to regain confidence in our food.

Mr. Kendall also told your 2013 conference consumers should demand answers from the people they buy from. We agree European consumers can and should get what they want.

This action is a good first step.

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

Global pork titan Smithfield has ranked second among food production companies on Fortune magazine’s 2013 list of “Most Admired Companies”. Before we untangle how terribly strange and ironic this is, just what does “Most Admired” mean, and how was this list generated?

According to Fortune’s web site, the most admired companies list is the “definitive report card of corporate reputations”. The magazine asked executives at the world’s biggest companies to rank their peers in nine areas—everything from “investment value to social responsibility”. So the list is derived only from the opinions of an exclusive slice of the corporate world—not the public.

So let’s take this list with a grain of salt, and let’s take a look at what’s to “admire”. It makes piles of money, as the largest of the four companies that process 66% of all the hogs in the U.S. It owns more hogs than the next eight largest pork producers combined. It slaughters 26 million hogs a year. It’s the largest pork processor in the world, and economically and politically powerful. They are one of a small handful of companies pulling the strings when it comes to food policy in the U.S. and globally.

How did Smithfield become so big? Because the Department of Justice rarely finds the courage to say no to a merger. In the 70s, the company embarked on an aggressive strategy to buy out its competition. After buying up competition locally in Virginia, it honed in on the Midwest. The real turning point came in 1987, when it embarked on a partnership with Carroll’s Foods. For the first time, Smithfield was vertically integrated: they not only slaughtered the hogs; they raised them. In 1999, Smithfield bought the company outright.

As Smithfield continued to gobble up the competition, family farmers fought their quest for monopolization and the unfair contracts that accompanied their market dominance, and labor unions exposed their abhorrent labor practices from fast processing lines causing injury to intimidation (to prevent them from reporting injuries) and firings. Workers at Smithfield plants face a dangerous life on the job, even for the meatpacking industry. In the mid-2000s, Smithfield increased production of hogs at its flagship Tar Heel, North Carolina plant by 30,000 hogs a day, corresponding to a doubling of workplace injuries as line speeds increased.

And its environmental record? Atrocious. In 1997 the company received one of the largest Clean Water Act fines in U.S. history for failing to install decent pollution equipment and treat its waste. Pollutants from its operations flowed into the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries for more than five years. The company was fined $12.6 million, which amounted to 0.035 percent of its annual sales—a mere drop in the bucket.

Smithfield has a legacy of family farm destruction, labor abuses and environmental devastation. What’s to admire about that? Either the world’s top executives are completely out of touch or this list is a shameless exercise in worshipping the bottom line, at all costs.

Maybe, it’s both.

By Michele Merkel

Despite all the rhetoric about how important it is to have an unpolluted and healthy Chesapeake Bay, sometimes you just have to wonder if anyone is really taking this Bay cleanup issue seriously. We’ve known for years now that agricultural operations in the Bay states are the number one source of nutrients and sediments to the watershed, yet neither state nor federal regulators have shown any willingness to do any of the things – permitting, compliance mandates and enforcement – that have worked well with so many other polluting industries.

While power plants, paper mills, sewage treatment plants and manufacturing plants have largely been cleaned up through the implementation of regulatory “stick” approaches, the chosen method of ag pollution abatement comprises of a series of unsuccessful, voluntary “carrot” approaches, including manure transport programs and nutrient trading.

After decades of failure, we’re about to reach new depths of futility with a bill, largely written by Maryland’s own Department of Agriculture, which was introduced this legislative session in Maryland by Senator Thomas Middleton. Middleton’s “Ag Certainty” bill will not only make certain that these highly polluting operations continue to pollute with officially sanctioned immunity, but it will also openly undermine the current Bay cleanup plan – the Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL).

Ag Certainty refers to a program under which agricultural operations that certify that they meet pollution reduction goals or certain pollution-control requirements will be deemed in compliance with existing and/or future water quality regulations and standards. In short, it’s a blanket immunity program designed to offer Big Ag a continuing free ride from mandatory pollution control and enforcement. Even worse, it ties regulator’s hands when it comes to implementing more protective water quality approaches when needed. Read the full article…

Last week, a condensed version of Andy Bellatti’s interview with Wenonah Hauter on her new book Foodopoly ran on Grist: Aisle be damned: How Big Food dominates your supermarket choices. We thought our blog readers would appreciate seeing the entire interview, which goes into the specifics on how fractured our food system really is,  how it got that way and what we can do about it.

1. In Foodopoly, you make a very convincing argument that, unlike what many in the “good food” movement think, crop subsidies are not the problem to solve, but rather the symptom of a much larger problem. Can you expand on that concept? Read the full article…

By Sarah Borron

Take action today to ensure accountability and transparency in the use of antibiotics on farm animals.

The misuse of antibiotics in livestock feed, known as “subtherapeutic use,” is an ongoing problem in U.S. agriculture and a threat to public health. The practice of feeding large groups of livestock antibiotics whether or not they are sick contributes to the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, threatening people with diseases that are harder to treat.

The FDA, the government agency responsible for tackling this problem, has touted its voluntary initiatives to encourage the industry to change its practices. But Food & Water Watch has spoken out against subtherapeutic use of antibiotics and supports a legislative ban on the practice. We don’t think a voluntary ban is enough, and, thanks to internal FDA documents obtained from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), we discover that FDA isn’t so sure the plan will work either.

PEER requested documentation from the FDA on industry’s support for the voluntary guidance on antibiotic use in livestock. Instead, PEER received internal memos revealing that FDA staff acknowledged serious concerns: 

Click here to see our infographic about how antibiotic use on farms makes us sick.

• A weakness of the voluntary strategy is its reliance on industry cooperation and lack of deadlines in the guidance. Some emails show that FDA staff are not confident the industry will comply.
• Regulations might be necessary to reduce antibiotic use in livestock feed in a timely fashion.
• The FDA doesn’t even collect enough data to evaluate the effectiveness of the voluntary strategy.
• The FDA tweaked language in the voluntary guidance to improve the agency’s chances of winning an appeal on a lawsuit that would force it to regulate subtherapeutic antibiotic use. The lawsuit states clearly that voluntary strategies are unacceptable.

We’re left scratching our heads. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is real and pressing. The voluntary strategy may or may not work. After decades of delay, why dilly-dally with a voluntary strategy instead of writing and enforcing regulations to do the job effectively?

As we press Congress and the FDA on the larger issue of subtherapeutic antibiotic use, there’s one action you can take today to improve the situation. The FDA is requesting feedback on how to improve its data collection on antibiotics used in livestock feed. No matter what, we need that data to see if the situation is getting better or worse. Take a moment today to ensure accountability and transparency as we work to change this issue.

By Scott Edwards

The Crutchfields

I’m an environmentalist. So when I think about our industrialized system of agriculture and the proliferation of mega-factory farms across the country, where giant companies like Perdue, Tyson, Smithfield and a handful of others dominate our increasingly fragile landscapes, my first thoughts go to the impacts on watersheds and airways. I tend to dwell on the unsustainability of hundreds of thousands of tons of chicken manure piled high in places like the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay is dying, or the millions of gallons of fetid hog waste lying in lagoons all across the eastern part of North Carolina, overflowing into the Neuse River every time it rains. But the other night I was told a story about an equally dark side of our industrialized ag system, one where the ruin of our natural resources is matched every bit by the destruction of rural families and futures, where every day struggling farmers suffer rude awakenings from the American dream.

Back in 1987, Karen and Mitchell Crutchfield were living a quiet life in a 3 bedroom brick home near where the Arkansas River winds through the state of Arkansas. Their home was situated on 17 acres of farmland that was passed down to Karen by her grandfather. Mitchell had spent 16 years working as a towboat engineer on the Mississippi River.

Back then, the Crutchfields decided to take a shot with a business of their own. They weren’t looking for shortcuts to get rich quick, or ways to profit off the hard work of others. Karen and Mitchell weren’t hoping for fancy cars and big McMansions; theirs was a modest dream. They were going to be chicken farmers, knowing that it meant that they would have to struggle every day to pay their bills, but they could look forward to a simple and peaceful retirement some decades down the road.      

The Crutchfields entered into a contract to raise chickens for Tyson Foods, an Arkansas chicken empire that is one of the largest industrial food producers in the world today, with profits in 2010 of $780 million. In the beginning, they mortgaged their debt-free home and land and took out big loans from the Farm Credit to build their first chicken houses. The Crutchfields were loyal to Tyson. They even purchased 3000 shares of the company’s stock so they could enjoy some small benefit from the massive profits that Tyson earns off the hard work of their contract growers. And for two and a half decades Karen and Mitchell Crutchfield played by all the rules.

Every time Tyson told them to upgrade the chicken houses or install new equipment or add structures, the Crutchfields complied, even though it meant taking out more loans just to keep up. And at the end of each flock, when Tyson came to pick up the birds that the Crutchfields had so carefully raised according to the company’s evolving standards, they only received about half the money they earned. The other half? Tyson sent that directly to the Farm Credit to pay off the rolling debt the Crutchfields had incurred to keep up with Tyson’s demands. 

The money left over wasn’t enough to get by on. So the Crutchfields did what almost every poultry contract grower in the country does – they took on other jobs to make ends meet.  At some points, Karen was working 3 jobs while Mitchell cared for Tyson’s birds. And even though it wasn’t fair that Tyson was paying the Crutchfields less than 5 cents per pound of chicken raised in their houses while charging $1.25 or more per pound at the grocery store, and despite the fact that the Crutchfields had to sell off all their 3000 shares of Tyson stocks over the years to survive, it was all okay because they were working towards the dream they started 25 years ago, when one day the Farm Credit loans would all be paid off and once again they’d be debt-free.

The Crutchfields were going to reach their goal three short years from now, when they would be in their mid 60’s. They were going to put off retirement until well past the age of 65 so they could spend their golden years with some small margin of comfort. But a year ago, their dream came crashing down. Not only did the Crutchfields get the rug pulled out from under them, they’re about to have their entire home and all their land yanked away.

Last year Tyson demanded yet another upgrade to the Crutchfields’ chicken houses. This time it was to install computerized ventilation equipment under Tyson’s “Premium House Mandate” program. The cost? According to the Crutchfields, somewhere around $250-300 thousand. Tyson told the Crutchfields that in exchange for the quarter of a million dollar upgrade, they would receive a raise of a penny per pound of chicken. A penny per pound for another $300,000 in debt – that’s a “raise” none of us could afford to accept.

Even so, in a desperate effort to hold onto at least a fragment of their dream while not putting themselves into a hole out of which they’d likely never be able to climb, the Crutchfields asked the Farm Credit for another loan to update only half of their six poultry houses. The Farm Credit refused, saying it was all or nothing. Daunted by the prospects of suddenly sinking another $300,000 deeper, the Crutches did what any responsible person would have done – they said no to more debt.

Last March, Tyson refused to renew the Crutchfields’ contract, abandoning them just a few years short of their finally being able to pay off their debts and after 25 years of loyal service. Tyson’s betrayal left them without any steady source of income to pay off the last three years of their Farm Credit loans. It seems that someone at Tyson didn’t read the  “core values” listed on the company’s website, where they claim to “strive to be honorable” and “care about each other,” before they kicked the Crutchfields to the curb. And the curb is exactly where this farm family will end up because the Farm Credit is now foreclosing on their property. The foreclosure hearing is taking place in early December of this year, in time for the banks to take the Crutchfields’ home and land just as the Arkansas winter sets in. 

Sadly, this tale should be the exception, but its not; it happens to small farmers on a regular basis all across the country, where big agribusinesses force their contract growers into massive debt while the companies reap huge profits. If you want to see who is destroying sustainable family farming in America, you don’t have to look any further than Tyson and Perdue and the other major meat producers. When you’re a poultry contract grower, there’s never any catching up. The dream you had when you started out stays just that – an elusive dream. The best that you can hope for is that it doesn’t turn into a horrible nightmare, as it has for the Crutchfields.