by Maureen Ogle
The idea was neither new nor unusual. As early as the 1890s, Wilbur Atwater, at the time one of the nation’s best-known nutritionists and head of a federal nutrition program, maintained that applying factory methods to farming was both logical and inevitable. He pointed out that historically, as human societies shifted from agricultural to urban, demand for manufactured goods increased. Inventors had responded by devising tools and machines designed to produce goods on a large scale at a low price. Atwater argued that modern urban societies required “a cheap and abundant food-supply,” and so it was time for Americans to “manufacture” basic foodstuffs—corn, wheat, beef, and pork—by applying to agriculture the “principle which has proved itself true . . . in the factory.” His choice of model was not surprising. The factory lay at the heart of the American economy. Mass-produced goods were inexpensive goods, far less costly than those made by hand by artisans. Thanks to factory production, most Americans owned more than one shirt or skirt and multiple pieces of furniture. The factory had made America great. Why not extend its combination of automation and organization to the farm? If manufacturers could build high-speed assembly lines to manufacture huge quantities of low-priced goods, farmers could do the same.
Factory farming also dovetailed with a cultural value prized by Americans living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: efficiency, of which the factory was a primary embodiment. Americans believed that a powerful, successful nation was one that practiced efficiency because doing so ensured maximum productivity from people, machines, and institutions. In pursuit of that goal, universities turned out cadres of experts—engineers, sociologists, statisticians—trained to analyze, dissect, and codify every aspect of American society, from kindergarten instruction to intellectual testing to bookkeeping; from housekeeping and cooking to filing systems and traffic management. Anything and everything could be quantified and thus managed for maximum efficiency and productivity. By the turn of the century, only farming had escaped the drive toward efficiency. It remained, in the felicitous phrase of one historian, the nation’s “last great nest of chaos,” an inefficient backwater that prevented farmers from keeping pace with consumer demand, a state of affairs experienced in the form of rising food prices. Economists reasoned that bigger harvests would yield cheaper food and a healthier, more productive workforce (and stave off anarchy, socialism, and other evils). But the urge to improve agriculture stemmed from more than just a desire to keep food prices low. In an age of imperial expansion, many feared that the relatively primitive state of agriculture would leave the United States behind in the food race or, worse, force Americans to rely on imported foods, which would be tantamount to abandoning a cornerstone of the American ideal. “When a nation depends on other nations for its food,” argued one writer, its relationships with those others must inevitably consist of “either subordination or control. Whether a nation becomes a dependent or dominant nation depends upon the ability of its agricultural population to provide for the whole population.” “The wars of the future,” predicted an employee at the Department of Agriculture, would depend less on weaponry than “upon the ability of the people, not only to produce largely, but to live cheaply.” Unless agriculture became Fordized, Americans would be reduced to the status of the rice eaters in Asia, the worst imaginable fate for an industrial (and racist) society. High time, then, to tame the backward beast of agriculture and transform it into a model of systematized, mechanized efficiency.
The farm crisis of the 1920s inspired a new generation, including many farmers, to embrace factory farming as a way to manage the paradox of plenty. In their minds, factorylike efficiency in field and barn would reduce farmers’ costs of production. The less money farmers spent to grow corn or feed cattle, the more profit they could earn when it came time to sell. An agricultural economist conceded that in the short run, “industrial agriculture” might “have a demoralizing effect” on rural Americans, but over time, weaker farmers would leave the land and those that remained would enjoy “a higher standard of living”—and, of course, reduce the amount of money Americans spent on food and thus maintain the health of the consumer economy.
Two decades (and a depression and another world war) would pass before factory farming reached full flower, but during the crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans embraced factory farming as a way to manage the peaks and troughs of agricultural production and to integrate farming into the larger economy. The USDA, the land grant schools, lobbying groups like the then-new American Farm Bureau, and interested corporations developed and supported policies, technologies, and products designed to help farmers increase yields, maximize efficiency, and reduce production costs. Those efforts spurred livestock research, the manufacture of commercial fertilizers, and the development of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, and hybrid corn.
So it’s no accident that when Jesse Jewell cast about for a way to save his business, he latched on to this new model of farming. If nothing else, its focus on integrated, centralized organization appealed to his businessman’s sensibilities. Jewell had spent much of the 1920s working as a surveyor in Florida during a real estate boom there. But when the boom went bust in the late 1920s (a harbinger of the bad times to come), he headed back to Gainesville and his mother’s feed store, where business had evaporated, thanks to the agricultural crisis.
In many ways, Georgia and other southern states had never recovered from the devastation of the Civil War, when northern troops destroyed both crops and livestock. That war ended slavery, but most southern black farmers, and many white ones, too, traded legal enslavement for the chains of sharecropping: they worked land but did not own it, “paying” rent with the crops they grew, typically either cotton or tobacco. Sharecropping fueled a cycle of debt and poverty that left rural Georgians chained to the land and to debt. Tenant farmers started the planting season by borrowing seed, tools, and even basic food supplies such as flour, cornmeal, and bacon from local merchants like the Jewells. At harvest, sharecroppers all dumped their crops on the market at the same time, and the ensuing glut drove down the prices they received for them. There was never enough profit to pay rent or the debts owed to merchants.
Then came the farm crisis of the 1920s. Prices for both tobacco and cotton collapsed. Sharecroppers sank deeper into debt and prayed that their landlords would not evict them and that merchants would not deny them credit for food. A boll weevil infestation exacerbated the despair, devouring cotton crops as they stood in the field. Landowners evicted their croppers. Furnishing merchants, having lost the crops that paid their own bills, went bankrupt. Banks shut their doors as landowners and merchants defaulted on loans. Such was the situation that Jesse Jewell faced when he returned to Gainesville in the late twenties.
Almost immediately, his predicament and almost everyone else’s worsened thanks to the onset of the Great Depression. That was particularly true for farmers, as their plight shifted from bad to horrific. Demand for foodstuffs dwindled, but farmers’ debts did not. Many families lost their farms. The growing disaster, plus the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, finally demolished resistance to the idea of subsidizing agriculture. Much of Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation aimed at restoring health to consumers: his alphabet agencies—the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to name two of many—created jobs that provided paychecks so that ordinary Americans would have money to spend. Farmers, Roosevelt recognized, were consumers, too, and shortly after his inauguration, Congress approved the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the first direct subsidy program. The AAA was designed in part to eliminate surpluses of key commodities, including hogs, dairy products, cotton, corn, rice, and tobacco. The bill authorized the USDA to buy those products, thereby removing them from the market and fueling a short-term scarcity. In theory, as those commodities became scarce, their prices would go up and farmers would earn more money. Then they could spend that to pay debts and to buy man
ufactured goods like shoes or gasoline, thus providing work for shoemakers, sales clerks, refinery workers, and gas station attendants. Or, as officials with the Roosevelt administration phrased it, shortages of hogs and cotton would “prime the pump” of the nation’s economy and help consumers get back to the business of consuming.
Initially the arrival of the AAA in Georgia drove Jesse Jewell closer to bankruptcy. Federal agents began paying farmers (or, more accurately, landowners) to plow up part of their cotton fields; what little remained of demand for the seed, feed, and fertilizer sold by Jewell evaporated. That’s when he turned to the project that would make him a multimillionaire. Some historians and industry insiders have credited Jewell as one of the inventors of the modern broiler industry. In fact, he and others were influenced by a similar industry being built at Delmarva, the spit of land where the borders of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia meet, where federal and state agricultural experts, bankers, and feed manufacturers were helping residents switch to large-scale chicken farming. In addition, by the 1930s, employees of the USDA and the nation’s land grant schools, as well as geneticists, animal nutritionists, and other scientists, had laid the groundwork for factorylike livestock production. A more accurate assessment of the broiler industry’s early years is that Jewell was less its inventor than a man who maximized opportunities presented by new research and a bounty of free expertise. But the nascent industry emulated the factory model in part because prior to the 1930s, making chickens for meat was less an industry than it was the work of a haphazard collection of entrepreneurs operating in scattered locations and according to rules of their own devising. So those who built the broiler industry started from scratch; it’s not surprising that they were inspired by the new model of farming and replaced the haphazard with factorylike structures.
Chickens had long been a ubiquitous presence on the American landscape; every farm family kept them, and until the twentieth century many city folks did, too. Unlike hogs and cattle, chickens needed little by way of care. Barnyard and backyard fowl foraged their surroundings, eating corn, food scraps, and insects. But prior to the twentieth century, a chicken’s primary purpose in life was to supply eggs, efficient packages of protein that could be easily preserved and transported long distances. In contrast, once slaughtered, chickens had to be eaten immediately, so in those days before mechanical refrigeration had become common, chicken meat was a rare treat. (The trait that makes poultry attractive to the health-conscious—its low saturated fat content—renders the flesh highly perishable.) As a result, fresh chicken was a seasonal food, available primarily in summer and fall. After hens laid eggs in spring and early summer, farmers culled the cockerels—young males—keeping a few to eat and hauling the rest, live and stashed in wooden crates, to the nearest town market, the makings for the summertime treat of fried chicken. In the fall, new supplies of poultry arrived at market as farmers rid their flocks of worn-out hens, aged roosters, and males kept on hand to raise to “roaster” size (about four pounds). These birds’ relatively tough flesh made for hearty winter soups and stews. Birds were sold whole so that shoppers could study the head and feet for clues to the carcass’s age and health. Spurs, for example, indicated an old male. Spoilage was impossible to disguise because poultry flesh turned green as it decayed, and “green-strucks” often ended up in the hands of merchants who specialized in cut-rate poultry for those with thin wallets.
But a growing urban nation demanded protein, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Armour and Swift companies tried to transform chicken from seasonal treat to dinner plate staple. In the spring, buyers scouted farms, especially in the Midwest where most eggs came from, in search of young birds. They delivered those to packer-owned feeding stations, which consisted of stacks of wire cages, “batteries,” each cage sized to hold four or five birds. Troughs attached to the sides allowed the birds to feed at will. For ten days to two weeks, the chickens feasted on ultrarich and fattening diets of corn, oats, and buttermilk. Some packer-processors accelerated the feeding process with cramming mechanisms: a wooden tripod equipped with a foot pedal and a rubber tube attached to a bag of feed. An operator shoved the tube down the bird’s throat and then pressed the pedal to force food from the bag into its gut. “Under the machine system,” explained one man, they “have to eat, and they must take on flesh. Then there is no waste of food.” When the animals reached a weight of two pounds, plant employees slaughtered them, leaving head, feet, and innards intact; scalded the carcasses to ease the removal of feathers; froze the carcasses, at that time a process that required three to four days; and packed them in wooden crates for immediate shipping or for storage in freezer warehouses.
Armour and Swift built their poultry operations primarily in the Midwest, where farms contained literally millions of laying hens. On the urban East and West coasts, a small number of entrepreneurs raised chickens specifically for meat and sold those to butchers in nearby cities, particularly ones who catered to the massive influx of Jewish émigrés from eastern Europe. Chicken figured heavily in their diets—observant Jews don’t eat pork and beef was a rare luxury—and many ate diets based on Talmudic law, including the stipulation that meat animals be slaughtered according to ritual. The schochet—the authorized religious representative—grabbed the bird by the wings with his left hand, then used that same hand to grab the head and yank back the neck. Using a sharp blade held in his less-occupied right hand, he slit the animal’s throat and tossed the bird into a barrel where, one observer noted, “it remain[ed] with others in the same condition until the death struggles” ended. When the barrel was full (and the “death struggles” presumably completed), an assistant dumped its contents onto the floor. The poultry was ready for buyers.
An altogether different market centered around specialty chickens like the “Philadelphia” broiler (born and raised in southern New Jersey). “Of all the toothsome, appetizing poultry,” raved one commentator, the Philly “most appeals to our palate.” “They are plump, tender-meated, juicy and sweet flavored,” a delightful combination created by an especially rich diet and by confining the birds to a small area so that they avoided “violent exercise” that led to “hardened muscles.” They were also, he added, “often beyond our pocketbook.” Indeed. Few companies specialized in raising chickens for meat, and because those birds required freezing and packing or, like the Philly broilers, were hand-raised on special diets, meat chickens were too expensive for most budgets. A Philadelphia broiler typically cost 50 cents a pound; in today’s money, that two-pound bird would cost $22. As long as the price was high, owners of butcher and grocery stores were reluctant to spend money on refrigerator or freezing equipment. Why bother when so few people could afford to eat chicken?
Without mass outlets and a mass market, there wasn’t much incentive to mass-produce chickens. Even Armour and Swift found it difficult to achieve economies of scale that would lower the price of poultry to the level of pork or beef. They sold virtually their entire output to a narrow market: high-end hotels and restaurants, posh resorts, railroads that offered first-class dining services, and caterers that specialized in serving what one broiler industry analyst called “swell spreads.” That narrow market also explains why the packers chose to invest in feeding operations: those customers demanded a uniform product, which could be achieved only by controlling the birds’ diet. “Hotel men and restaurant keepers,” one poultry man explained, “have found through experience that it does not work well to serve one banqueter half a large chicken and the next man a small one.” But size mattered, too: commercial kitchens prized two-pound broilers because those could be halved and cooked without subjecting impatient diners to a long wait. Finally, as a USDA employee explained, the packers’ “juicy, milk-fed” birds were superior to barnyard “ranger” chickens.
In the 1920s, the poultry industry was barely an industry. Production was limited, the price was high, and few Americans enjoyed access to chicken on a regular basis. When
members of the Republican Business Men, Inc., ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in the fall of 1928 touting the virtues of their party and presidential candidate Herbert Hoover, they promised that Republican prosperity would put “A Chicken in Every Pot.” (Hoover himself, it should be noted, never made such a promise.) The Republican businessmen were wrong: the job of putting a chicken in every pot would ultimately have little to do with Republican prosperity and much more to do with factorylike efficiency and taxpayer subsidies.
When the agricultural crisis hit Georgia in the 1920s, many businessmen and employees at the state’s land grant school, the University of Georgia (UGA), latched on to both chickens and eggs as replacements for cotton and as resources that would revive and diversify the ailing economy. They lobbied the legislature for funds to support a new program aimed at increasing livestock production, especially poultry. UGA faculty helped organize a poultry trade association that coordinated the production and marketing of both chickens and eggs. Bankers encouraged these projects with loans to businessmen, and a railroad line sponsored “poultry specials,” train cars loaded with chickens and headed for northern cities. Forty-one hatcheries opened in Georgia during the first half of the 1920s, and executives at Swift and Company encouraged the trend by buying up every broiler and fryer that company agents could find and slaughtering them at an existing packing plant. But the new chicken boosters weren’t interested in simply populating farms with barnyard birds. Rather, they specifically promoted an industry based on science and modeled on the factory, urging struggling farmers to build modern chicken coops that included electricity and heating. Officials at Georgia’s Department of Agriculture helped entrepreneurs build hatcheries and encouraged poultry growers to start with purebred stock rather than barnyard “scrubs.”
