Consumers are each year, eating more and more chicken, of which, the price to purchase chicken for those consumers, especially in comparison to other poultry, meat, and pork, is quite reasonable. One would think then, that there would therefore be plenty of money to be made as a chicken farmer, of which, while there is plenty of money so being made, it is not being made by the chicken farmers, but rather it is being made by the big corporate chicken processors, almost exclusively.
The first inkling, that not everything is on the up and up is the salient fact that many chicken farmers, in order to have a producer to sell their mature chickens to, are required to buy their baby chickens from that producer, as well as the feed, and medication, while also adhering to whatever requirements, inspections, and upgrades that are so needed to their chicken house enclosures, as determined by that big corporate chicken producer. This would seem to clearly indicate that the chicken producer has an incredible amount of leverage and power over the chicken farmer, and in fact, they do. They then use such to their full advantage, so that the profits so being made is pretty much all in the producer’s hands, and the chicken farmer, who while working incredibly hard, and trying to make a decent living, often finds themselves, in an untenable situation that doesn’t ever permit them to ever get out of debt, nor to make any real money to live or to build upon.
The other giveaway that all is not fair, is the fact that the chicken producers, essentially control everything in the process from cradle to grave, except the actual monetary expenses for the chicken house and its associated equipment, along with the labor of those that are bringing up those baby chickens into their chicken adulthood -- so that these chickens can subsequently thereby be processed into chicken products of all types for consumers and restaurants. In other words, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason, why the chicken producers wouldn’t just want to produce their chickens from babyhood to adulthood, except for the explanation, that by not doing so, the chicken producers save valuable capital expense, as well as the inconvenience of labor, without giving up much of anything in value, in return; except the illusion that chicken farmers can actually have a fair chance to make a decent living from what they are so doing on the chicken producers behalf.
In sharecropping, the land owner allows the tenant to use his land, in exchange for some valued portion of the product so produced, of which, the bottom line is that those that do the sharecropping, though working very hard, typically find at the end of the harvest season, that they always get the short end of the stick, in perpetuity, never to get ahead, and never to outright own any of the land that they labor so hard upon. So then, with today’s chicken farmers, there is a lot of capital needed to purchase the land along with the housing and the infrastructure to successfully raise chickens, of which, these chicken farmers are typically forever in debt, never seeming to be in a position to ever get out of it, despite their hard work, and despite giving their full and best effort to that business. Rather, the money being made and most of the benefit ends up going to the big corporate chicken producers, which reflects that contract or no contract, legal or not, what is going on, is sure the heck deceptive and most definitely unfair.