Fact Sheets: Factory Farms

Savefarmfamilies.org, a website launched on September 15, 2011, was purportedly created to help Alan and Kristin Hudson, who own a poultry operation located near Maryland’s Eastern Shore, pay their mounting legal bills from a lawsuit filed by the environmental non-profit Waterkeeper Alliance and its local member program, Assateague Coastkeeper. It claims to be a grassroots effort to help save the “family farm,” including the Hudsons’, from radical environmental groups. Unfortunately, it attempts to do so by perpetuating many myths about industrial chicken operations in Maryland and the lawsuit itself. In fact, SaveFarmFamilies.org is an “astroturfing” effort — an industry-generated website used to spread misinformation while purporting to be by farmers, for farmers. This fact sheet is intended to debunk some of the many inaccuracies and misstatements promoted by the website.

The earnings of all but the richest people in America have been stagnant for the past four decades, making it harder for both urban and rural families to put healthy food on the table. The recession made the problem of food insecurity worse. By 2009, one in every seven rural residents and one in every nine urban residents received food stamps. How can we turn things around and build a healthier, fairer food system?

In early 2008, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it considered meat and milk from cloned animals to be safe to eat despite years of controversy and a long list of unresolved ethical, health and animal welfare concerns. In concert with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), regulators asked the livestock industry to continue a voluntary moratorium on allowing meat and milk from cloned animals into the food supply. As early as January 2008, the USDA identified potential concerns about clones entering “export channels,” saying, “industry will implement its livestock cloning supply chain management program which will establish protocols for tracking animal clones” — although this does not appear to yet be in place. Equally disconcerting, animal products derived from clones have no labeling requirements, depriving consumers of their right to choose or the ability to avoid cloned products if they are concerned about this technology.

The beef-packing industry is more powerful and consolidated now than it was a century ago when Congress enacted the Packers & Stockyards Act to break up the beef monopolies. Beef packing is the most concentrated industry in the meat and poultry sector. Meatpackers have merged into a few dominant players that slaughter and market almost all of the beef products in the United States. Today, just four firms slaughter more than four out of five beef cattle. This concentration gives large packers tremendous leverage over independent cattle producers. The beef-packing industry has also expanded beyond slaughter and processing and now large packers own their own cattle and operate feedlots, thus controlling supply through all stages of production. These practices enable the meatpackers to drive down cattle prices while keeping consumer beef prices high.

Enviropig is the trade name for a genetically engineered hog currently being developed at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Enviropig is being marketed as an improvement in swine physiology that will lead to less water pollution. So what makes this designer pig so environmentally friendly? As it turns out, not much at all.

The poultry sector is completely dominated by a few large poultry processing companies, known as integrators, that control every step of chicken production — from chicks to cutlets. Farmers that raise chickens are known as growers; these growers do not even own the birds that they raise and fatten for the processors, often under abusive contracts. Integrators deliver chicks to the growers, micromanage how the birds are raised, and frequently require the growers to build and upgrade expensive henhouses in order to keep getting contracts. Chickens reach slaughter and processing weight in about six or seven weeks, but loans taken out to build henhouses can last for more than a decade, making many chicken growers entirely dependent on a series of flock-to-flock contracts to repay their debts. The poultry sector is less like a free market than abject serfdom. Growers are reluctant to defend themselves from abusive practices because integrators can retaliate by cutting off their contracts. Often there is only one processor operating in any one area, which leaves growers with no other options to sell poultry.

Bad farm policy and unchecked corporate mergers have driven out independent family farmers, creating powerful agribusiness giants with massive market share. And after decades of government officials looking the other way, regulators are finally acknowledging that there might be a problem. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) are conducting public workshops around the country to hear about the state of competition in agriculture markets.

A small number of private interests will make out big financially by supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tracking devices and software to livestock producers.

From its humble beginnings as a father-and-son ham-curing operation in rural America more than 70 years ago, Smithfield Foods has grown into a 7.75 billion Euro-per-year, multinational meat conglomerate with operations in 13 countries on three continents. Of late, Virginia-based Smithfield has been expanding aggressively into Eastern Europe, where its operations have stirred controversy because of their threats to local farming economies, the environment and animal welfare.

Today, many of the meat and dairy products sold in the United States come from factory farms – industrial-scale facilities where tens of thousands of animals are crowded together in tight conditions and cannot carry out normal behaviors such as grazing, rooting and pecking.