Americans eat a phenomenal amount of chicken, more than any other meat. Those of us over 50 can still remember when chicken was a treat for special occasions because it was more expensive than beef. Today chicken is the cheapest meat, and its consumption has doubled since 1970. Advocates of factory farming boast that their techniques have brought chicken within the reach of working families.

Tyson Foods proudly calls itself “the largest provider of protein products on the planet,” as well as “the world leader in producing and marketing beef, pork, and chicken.” Tyson now produces more than 2 billion chickens a year, and if you are shopping in a typical American supermarket, close to a quarter of the chicken you see on the shelves will have been produced by Tyson.

Virtually all the chicken sold in America—more than 99 percent, according to Bill Roenigk, vice president of the National Chicken Council—comes from factory-farm production similar to that used by Tyson Foods. The ethical issues raised by its production of chicken therefore exemplify issues raised by modern intensive chicken production in general. We can divide these issues into three categories, according to whether they most immediately impact the chickens, the environment, or humans.

The Cost To Our Ethics

To call someone a “birdbrain” is to suggest exceptional stupidity. But chickens can recognize up to 90 other individual chickens and know whether each one of those birds is higher or lower in the pecking order than they are themselves. Researchers have shown that if chickens get a small amount of food when they immediately peck at a colored button, but a larger amount if they wait 22 seconds, they can learn to wait before pecking.

Interesting as these studies are, the point of real ethical significance is not how clever chickens are, but whether they can suffer—and of that there can be no serious doubt. Chickens have nervous systems similar to ours, and when we do things to them that are likely to hurt a sensitive creature, they show behavioral and physiological responses that are like ours. When stressed or bored, chickens show what scientists call “stereotypical behavior,” or repeated futile movements, like caged animals who pace back and forth. When they have become acquainted with two different habitats and find one preferable to the other, they will work hard to get to the living quarters they prefer.

Most people readily agree that we should avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals. Summarizing the recent research on the mental lives of chickens and other farmed animals, Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, in England, has said: “Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our farming culture accordingly.” We are about to see how far that farming culture would have to change to achieve this.

Almost all the chickens sold in supermarkets—known in the industry as “broilers”—are raised in very large sheds. A typical shed measures 490 feet long by 45 feet wide and will hold 30,000 or more chickens. The National Chicken Council, the trade association for the U.S. chicken industry, issues Animal Welfare Guidelines that indicate a stocking density of 96 square inches for a bird of average market weight—that’s about the size of a standard sheet of American 8.5-inch by 11-inch typing paper. When the chicks are small, they are not crowded, but as they near market weight, they cover the floor completely—at first glance, it seems as if the shed is carpeted in white. They are unable to move without pushing through other birds, unable to stretch their wings at will, or to get away from more dominant, aggressive birds.

If the producers gave the chickens more space they would gain more weight and be less likely to die, but it isn’t the productivity of each bird—let alone the bird’s welfare—that determines how they are kept. As one industry manual explains: “Limiting the floor space gives poorer results on a per bird basis, yet the question has always been and continues to be: What is the least amount of floor space necessary per bird to produce the greatest return on investment.”

The Cost to the Environment

In western Kentucky, the masthead of The Messenger, the local newspaper of Madisonville, carries the slogan “The Best Town on Earth.” But if you had been in the audience of a hearing at the Madisonville Technology Center on the evening of June 29, 2000, you would have had to wonder about that. The Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet of the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection was listening to public comment on a proposed regulation for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, also known as factory farms. A long procession of citizens came up and made their views known. Here is a selection:

“Since Tyson took over the operation of the growing houses, there is a very offensive odor that at times has taken my breath. There has been a massive invasion of flies. It is hard to perform necessary maintenance on our property.”

“Uncovered hills of chicken waste attract hundreds of thousands of flies and mice… People, including school children, cannot enjoy a fresh morning’s air and can’t inhale without gagging or coughing due to the smell.

“My family lives next to chicken houses. We caught 80 mice in two days in our home. The smell is nauseating … My son and I got stomach cramps, diarrhea, nausea, and we had a sore on our mouths that would not go away. We went to the doctor and my son had parasites in his intestines. Where are the children’s rights? Should families have to sacrifice a safe and healthy environment for the economic benefit of others?”

Western Kentucky is an example of a nationwide problem. In Warren County, in northern New Jersey, Michael Patrisko, who lives near an egg factory farm, told a local newspaper that the flies around his neighborhood are so bad, “You literally can look at a house and think it’s a different color.” Buckeye Egg Farm in Ohio was fined $366,000 for failing to handle its manure properly. Nearby residents had complained for years about rats, flies, foul odors, and polluted streams from the 14-million-hen complex. At the same time, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was threatening to sue Arkansas poultry producers, including Tyson Foods, saying that waste from the companies’ operations is destroying Oklahoma lakes and streams, especially in the northeast corner of the state.

Tyson produces chicken cheaply because it passes many costs on to others. Some of the cost is paid by people who can’t enjoy being outside in their yard because of the flies and have to keep their windows shut because of the stench. Some is paid by kids who can’t swim in the local streams. Some is paid by those who have to buy bottled water because their drinking water is polluted. Some is paid by people who want to be able to enjoy a natural environment with all its beauty and rich biological diversity. These costs are, in the terms used by economists, “externalities” because the people who pay them are external to the transaction between the producer and the purchaser.

Consumers may choose to buy Tyson chicken, but those who bear the other, external costs of intensive chicken production do not choose to incur them. Short of moving house—which has its own substantial costs—there is often little they can do about it. Economists—even those who are loudest in extolling the virtues of the free market—agree that the existence of such externalities is a sign of market failure. In theory, to eliminate this market failure, Tyson should fully compensate everyone adversely affected by its pollution. Then its chicken would no longer be so cheap.

This article is reprinted with permission from The Cornucopia Institute.

In a move truly deserving of the comment “You can’t make this stuff up,” illustrating the widening divide in the organic community the USDA’s National Organic Program announced this week that they would require public interest groups, educators, and the public to get their blessing before using the USDA organic logo in media coverage.

Maybe this edict isn’t entirely Orwellian, and maybe it’s not Stalinistic, but it sure smacks of how the press operates under Premier Vladimir Putin.

After months of pointed criticism, and press coverage,of a series of allegedly illegal power grabs by the USDA, stripping authority Congress vested in the advisory panel it created, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), the USDA has figured out a way to resolve the dispute — control the message.

Their quarterly newsletter, distributed this week, recapped the recent NOSB meeting in San Antonio, Texas. It was one of the most contentious meetings in the history of the organic movement. It included a protest that initially shut down the proceedings and a parliamentary challenge to the illegal power grab by NOP staff director Miles McEvoy.

The protest ended after police came in for an arrest and the challenge, under Roberts Rules of Order, endorsed by a number of board members, only ended after a long adjournment where Mr. McEvoy conferred with his staff (and superiors and lawyers in Washington by phone) and subsequently threatened to shut the entire meeting down and send everyone home if the parliamentary motion challenging his authority wasn’t withdrawn.

But if you read the USDA’s Organic Integrity Quarterly you might question the “accuracy” of their story. There’s not a word of any dispute at the meeting even though, besides the protests, numerous citizens and public interest groups, in formal written and oral testimony, condemned the USDA’s actions.

And this meeting came on the heels of a letter written to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack by the two primary authors of the Organic Foods Production Act, the law that gave the USDA the authority to establish the NOP in the first place. Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Peter DeFazio clearly stated that the USDA moves were a violation of congressional intent and requested their immediate reversal.

Not a word about any of this in the USDA’s quarterly organic newsletter.

But now the USDA wants to read anything The Cornucopia Institute, a corporate and governmental watchdog in the organic arena, or any other public interest group intends to publish if we want to use the USDA organic logo.  This logo is owned by the citizens of the United States of America.

Now don’t get me wrong. Their advice to commercial interests, to have their certifiers review labels where they might use the USDA seal, for compliance with the law, is sound. But stifling constitutionally protected free speech? No, that’s a gross overstep of power.

Cornucopia’s Board President, a third-generation certified organic farmer from Durand, Wisconsin, Helen Kees, after reading this newsletter instructed Cornucopia staff to “Give ‘em hell” and included a referral to an experienced constitutional lawyer. We doubt it that will be necessary. Someone at the USDA will be wise enough to not kick that hornet’s nest.

The former Soviet comic Yakov Smirnoff recently appeared on National Public Radio. He talked about how his standup routine was censored before he immigrated to the U.S. NPR’s Bob Garfield said, “He wasn’t making it up, well, except for the name, ‘Department of Jokes,’ which was actually the Humor Department of the Censorship Apparatus within the Soviet Ministry of Culture.”

So I guess I should have submitted this commentary for Mr. McEvoy to refer to his “Department of Sanitation” within the USDA Ministry of Culture.

The divide between the corporate sector/USDA and traditional organic agriculturalists is actually no laughing matter.

USDA Secretary Vilsack addresses the Organic

Trade Association’s Policy Conference on May 21.

Deputy Administrator McEvoy seated left-center.

Source: OTA

In addition to Mr. Leahy and Mr. DeFazio, virtually every public interest group, that monitors the organic industry, along with consumers and farmers, called for the reversal of the heavy-handed moves by the USDA alleging that they are going to undercut the credibility of the organic label.  Only powerful industry interests are siding with the regulators.

And who is on the other side? The clout-heavy industry lobby group, Organic Trade Association, United Natural Foods Incorporated (the largest organic food distributor), Stonyfield and the nation’s largest organic certifier, CCOF.

More recently, and disturbingly, the umbrella group for the nation’s organic certifiers, the independent inspectors/auditors that act as agents of the USDA, overseeing farms and giant corporate processors alike, have chimed in, coming to the USDA’s defense.

The certifiers are supposed to be the independent umpires. The only thing that assures that they will not be biased, in favor of their clients who write them their paychecks, is the judicious oversight of the USDA’s accreditation and auditing of these entities. And now you have them buttering up Mr. McEvoy and helping in his damage control campaign? How unseemly.

What makes it even more unseemly is the fact that the board of directors at two of the largest certifiers, CCOF and OCIA, say they never were informed by their staff of their organization’s endorsement of the controversial moves at the USDA.

The organic movement has always been about transparent debate and the focal point has always been at the semi-annual meetings of the National Organic Standards Board. That board can no longer set its own work plan and agenda, and Mr. McEvoy has now effectively appointed himself co-chairman of the board.

All that would be bad enough but now he wants to control the news and censor dissent. Those of us who care deeply about the ethical precepts that the organic movement was founded upon will not let that happen.

Mark Kastel, Codirector

The Cornucopia Institute