Contract Chicken Farmers: ‘Serfs With a Mortgage’

The farmed-animal industry has been accused of misleading its contract farmers and leaving them high and dry after they’ve gone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt setting up their farms. Contract farmers are paid to raise animals for massive companies like Tyson and Perdue, and 90 percent of chickens produced in the U.S. are now raised on these contract farms.⁸⁴ The contract farmers must pay to build massive sheds, where 30,000 to 50,000 chickens will be crowded together with less space per bird than a standard sheet of notebook paper. Then the farmers also have to foot the bill for all the heating, cooling, and ventilation systems, and they’re required to pay out of their own pockets to make any changes to those warehouses that the company demands. And then the company can cancel all further contracts with the farmers, sending their entire families into financial ruin.

According to Robert Taylor, an Auburn University agricultural economist, these contract farmers are basically a part of the only feudal economic relationship that remains in America: He calls them “serfs with a mortgage.” “They get caught up in a debt trap,” Taylor explains. “The grower has to take whatever he is offered, especially after he’s been ‘captured’—deeply indebted.”⁸⁵ Larry Owens, an Agriculture Department official in Texas, explains, “The [farmed-animal companies] pretty much control you, and if you complain, they can cut you off.”⁸⁶ Sometimes corporations pull out of areas altogether, as was the case when Tyson deserted Maryland farmers in 2003 after it shut down its slaughterhouse in the state. The contract farmers in these situations are left with no one to buy their animals, no other source of income, and mounting payments on the loans they took out to set up the farms in the first place.⁸⁷

Contract growers who are dropped by one company for complaining about unjust contracts and other hardball tactics often find that they’re blackballed at other corporations as well, so they are left with empty chicken warehouses and hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm debt. Royce Johnson, a contract farmer in Texas, says, “If only half of the growers would get together, we’d solve this problem easily,” but when contract animal farmers have tried to form associations to demand fair treatment, their efforts are usually halted because of pressure from the company.

Susan Martin, a former high school teacher, learned all this the hard way after she contracted to raise chickens for Sanderson Farms, a Mississippi-based chicken processor that sells more than a billion dollars in chicken flesh each year. After two years of raising chickens for Sanderson, Martin was nearly half a million dollars in debt, and under the terms of her contract, she could not sue the company for misleading her with its contract. In the end, she lost her farm and tens of thousands of dollars. “It was hell,” she said. “The worst thing was being treated like a dog.”⁸⁸

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