The rigged chicken game and the fracturing of rural America
Rural media's demise offers insights into our dysfunctional politics
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Happy New Year! Come Thursday, January 9, for a discussion put together by PEN America on the decimation of local news in North Carolina’s rural areas and what we’re gonna do about it. It’ll be at 7 p.m. at the NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, N.C. The case study I and many others worked on over the summer, published in November, will serve as a jumping off point. Southerly’s Lyndsey Gilpin is moderating a panel with yours truly, Alicia Bell of Free Press, author Antoinette Kerr, and Crystal Cavalier, citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation.
At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment going into the presidential election in 2020. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with bylines in publications big and small but with a sense that more of us in the media need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
I have a few other thoughts...
America’s rigged chicken
On an assignment over the summer, I followed a source’s beat-up green minivan down I-95 in southeastern North Carolina until we got off at an exit and, almost immediately, I saw a massive chicken plant rise in otherwise unspoiled farmland. I got ready to pull over.
I was surprised at the short trip, thinking I was in for a much longer haul. Jeff Currie, the area’s riverkeeper, wanted to show me one of the various chicken plants that had been cropping up around Robeson County with too little notice. Concerned about water pollution — runoff with god knows what in it from the farms is common — Currie had begun to keep his own list and knew where most of them were.
But as I prepared to stop, Jeff kept going. And going. And going. We settled onto back gravel roads, that gave way to dirt roads, passing the kind of way out of the way places not enough journalists bother to venture. Eventually, still within the county border, we stopped and chatted as nats bit at my ankles along a dirt road that overlooked a sprawling chicken farm. Later, I looked into the plant that I’d seen off the highway, and it turned into the lede of a case study on media in rural North Carolina.
I found out that larger plant was a good example of the power of traditional media, in this case the Fayetteville Observer, to shape decisions (for better or worse) and offered a way to get into a story about two neighboring counties. I’ll spare you the summary, but please feel free to read the rest, which came out with PEN America’s larger report on the demise of local media and what it means for democracy.
But the Big City (well, bigger) city of Fayetteville pushing a potential environmental catastrophe onto its smaller, poorer neighbor holds a lot more lessons about why we are where we are, as does the wholly unremarked chicken plant operations that are erected with little to no oversight in North Carolina. In a word, the struggle of rural America is at the heart of why our social and political fabric is decaying.
In recent years, nearly all — or 99 percent — of both job and population growth have come in big metro areas, according to CityLab. Democrats still seem to be under the impression that people in rural areas are under a spell, and, if they just explain things to them, the GOP and Trump agenda that speaks to getting back jobs that will never come back or reopening plants and mines that won’t reopen (and, if they do, will employ mostly robots) is a charlatan’s game. One day, I guess the D’s strategy goes, they’ll wake up and pull the blue lever of common sense or their numbers will be so thin it won’t matter much anyway.
But, as environmental activist Mac Legerton pointed out to me, at least the Trump message on the economy in rural America actually did the very basic work of … addressing rural America. He couldn’t say the same for the Democrats, although the litmus test is a thin one.
“Both parties have neglected rural areas,” he said. “[But] the closest thing that either party came to a rural platform was Trump’s anti-NAFTA position.”
And, of course, the GOP uses — some might say divides or wields like a bludgeoning hammer — cultural issues to keep rural America in its pocket. “Cultural issues are more important than economic issues in rural America,” he told me. “The Democrats don’t understand that.” Democrats, of course, have largely run away from making their own arguments altogether, ceding the territory.
So the political status quo in rural America at the moment is 1) A GOP that manufactures a disingenuous rural agenda but at least peddles something that evokes an emotional response that yields dividends at the ballot box and 2) A Democratic party that cedes the game, along with the so-called culture wars issues — despite evidence that sensible regulation on guns and even arguments for women’s rights and abortion, for example, are more nuanced than the two parties are willing to admit. Both are playing a cynical game, the GOP seeking to keep a disillusioned electorate at home by smearing the other side as “Nancy Pelosi socialists” and the other figuring they only need to cater to urban areas to win state and national elections, demographics saving them in the long run.
Which brings us back to chicken farming. Part of the reason that folks in and around Fayetteville didn’t want Sanderson Farms opening up there — which led the company to relocate to nearby Robeson, whose business-friendly newspaper pushed the issue — had to deal with typical NIMBYism: namely the smell and traffic from trucks. But it also had to do with two long-term crippling factors. First, that the industry is not as safe or as environmentally sound as it claims to be, and second that the jobs it would bring, while certainly welcome in many ways, do not represent the sort of high-paying, stable jobs that areas should be trying to attract in a modern 21st Century economy. The Observer’s coverage helped feed and reflect massive concerns that even the possibility of poisonous groundwater would never be worth it in the long run, and the groundswell of concern helped defeat a powerful political and economic argument.
So Sanderson Farms put the chicken plant in Robeson. These are exactly the kind of jobs and industries that are offered in rural America, and there should be a place for independent farmers and producers to set up shop and earn a meaningful living from them.
Unfortunately, though, the game is rigged.
In 2015, five companies — Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Sanderson Farms, and Koch Foods — controlled 60 percent of the poultry market. The top 10 companies control 80 percent. So independent agriculture, used as a crutch for the kind of Americana we should all be able to get behind and comes every four years in a political ad coming near you, has become more and more untenable.
America’s rural area conundrum is even worse than the inability for people to buy a plot of land and raise and sell chickens at a fair price. The system itself is anti-capitalist, rigged against them from the very moment they take out a loan.
As Chris Leonard expertly laid out in a 2014 Guernica piece (and his book The Meat Racket) this consolidation and vertical control from massive conglomerates is unprecedented at any time in our history. Chicken companies control all aspects of production, meaning farmer's exercise little independence, from the feed they buy to the quality of the chickens they receive. While I’m sure these companies pay their dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and privately and publicly extol the virtues of free markets and American capitalism, they have created a system that is insulated completely from external market pressure and, allegedly, rig the game against those at the bottom of the rung.
Open markets should be open markets, and the Department of Justice’s antitrust division intervened last summer in a landmark price-fixing lawsuit to conduct its own investigation.
All of this has been well known for some time. President Obama, Leonard reported, even instructed his Agriculture Commissioner to push for a fairer system before his administration and Congress rolled over after pushback from Big Chicken. Their campaign even solicited farmers who deceptively pushed them to fight against rules and congressional intervention that would have helped them.
Here’s how the system works for chicken farmers, a process for getting paid that is known as “the tournament.” Per Guernica:
Because poultry companies own the birds, farmers aren’t paid a price per pound. Instead, companies like Tyson keep a tally of the farmers who deliver chickens to slaughter. Based on how well they fattened the birds on a given ration of feed, the farmers are ranked against each other. At the end of a given week, Tyson will mail out tournament results to all the farmers whose birds were processed. Farmers will learn how they ranked, how many players were in the tournament, and how much weight their birds gained on their feed rations. Those at the top receive premium payment, while those at the bottom are financially penalized.
But critical information is withheld. Farmers don’t know whom they have competed against, and sharing information with neighbors constitutes a breach of contract: the rankings are confidential, proprietary information of the Integrator. What each farmer does know is that his gain is his neighbor’s loss. Critically, the tournament is a zero-sum game: the financial windfall of the winners is taken from the pay of the losers. This means the tournament systematically pits farmers against each other. The difference in pay between the winners and the losers can be the difference between making a profit on six weeks of work and taking a loss.
Poultry companies say the tournament incentivizes farmers to work hard, which might make sense if they had any control over their operations. But the success of a given flock of chickens rests on the quality of feed the birds eat, and the healthiness of the chicks when they’re delivered. A farmer can be a genius, can put in ten-hour days, seven days a week, but he will not raise a good batch if his feed is bad or he gets sickly chicks. His impact is on the margins: if he completely neglects his birds, they won’t gain as much weight. If he’s in the chicken houses constantly, they’ll gain a little more. Farmers pray for good birds and feed, and the tournament is laid bare as a lottery.
Meat, at least the way it’s currently done, will likely be obsolete in the next two decades given its contribution to environmental catastrophe a.k.a climate change (a sad but true sentence to write, as there are few pleasures in life greater than the perfectly cooked ribeye). And by 2040 as Nick Williams of IndyWeek predicts , “Likewise, fish are fucked.”
In journalism, we often talk about whether something gets “covered” or not, or whether some neutral dissemination of information on a critical topic is available to the public. But that’s not the metric that either we as journalists or citizens should think about the problems that face us. In many ways, whether we as a society choose to prompt substantive discussions on a foundation of facts that yields action prompting changes in the direction of a more fair, just system is very much at the heart of what the future may or may not be. And rural America’s largely ignored woes should be all of ours, regardless of where we call home.
Leonard’s Guernica piece has a particularly telling anecdote about our politicians’ ability to tackle Big Chicken’s rigged game. Congress called what should have been a consequential hearing to hold industry accountable for its chicken shenanigans, perhaps a first salvo in pushing back against an industry that had created an artificial market and pushed many chicken farmers out of the industry entirely. Instead, in the weeks and months before the hearing, their campaign had made considerable headway. The night before the hearing, the North American Meat Association held a barbecue for Congress and their staff.
There was an open bar nearby, and the room was packed and noisy. Lobbyists and congressional staffers filled their plates and grabbed their drinks and mingled on the balcony. At the end of the night, the buffet table and bar were removed, the floor was cleaned up, and the furniture was arranged for the next day’s event.
The congressional hearing itself was less interesting than the party. Representatives went through a kind of Kabuki act, questioning the meat lobbyists and company representatives sitting in front of them in a way that seemed clumsily scripted. No one seemed interested in asking about monopolies, tournament systems, or competition. They wanted to know, again, how much the meat industry was being hurt by the federal mandate to produce ethanol. And just how much, again, did the industry detest a new rule that would require them to label meat imported from overseas as such?
Perhaps Congress was just a little too fat and happy to ask the hard questions. As Mac passionately made the case against a massive natural gas Atlantic Coast Pipeline proposal, part of which would run through Robeson County, he argues the future of rural America shouldn’t be to play whack-a-mole with one industry that won’t exist in the next fifty years after the other. “There’s no future in natural gas — or in hogs and chickens,” he said.