How The Farming Monopolies Turn Farmers into Modern Day Serfs Pt. 2
These are Far Worse than the Lords of Old
In the introduction to Mr. Griggs’ excellent article on Tyson, farmers, and how huge companies like Tyson turn small farmers into impoverished, dispossessed serfs, I promised to follow it up with a more in-depth dive into how such companies operate and what it is they do to impoverish the farmers with whom they contract. Such a follow-up was delayed by more timely articles on the Gracchi-Trump comparison and how Islam conquered much of the world, with disastrous present results. Now, however, we’ll explore how Tyson and similar companies operate and what policies of theirs impoverish the farmers that raise crops or animals for them.
The Old Lord-Tenant Relationship
As much of what we now see in America as applied to land, whether in farming, single-family housing, or urban real estate, boils down to corporate landlordism/corporate rentiers, it’s important to distinguish that present situation from what existed in the past, particularly in Britain. Landlords in Britain led to that country’s massive progress in the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, after all, so why not here?
The essential difference is that a multi-national, state-spanning, or even relatively large corporation is a far different, more impersonal entity than even a duke of old, much less a country gentleman.
Landlordism in Great Britain
In Great Britain up until the mid-20th Century, at which point most of the great estates of the aristocracy had been broken up because of high death taxes and income taxes, most land was owned by a few thousand noble families.1 The land report of the 1870s found that, while a million families owned some small patch of land, most of the farmland and city acreage was owned by the great landowners of the day.2 At the bottom of the scale were gentlemen and baronets, most of whom owned somewhere from 1,000 to 5,000 acres.3 Above them were the few hundred members of the aristocracy. Those members of the peerage tended to own far more land, generally on the order of estates of 10,000 acres and up.4 At the very top of the peerage scale were the dukes, such as the Dukes of Westminster, Bedford, and Norfolk. They tended to own land on the scale of 100,000 acres or more, or, in the case of Bedford and Westminster, owned much of the real estate in The City, London, and reaped rich rewards from that ownership.5
The defining feature of that land system was that, whatever its faults, the owners were tied to the land and the communities in which their estates sat. Some of the great landowners, such as the Marquesses of Bute, owned land across the country and so were embedded in many communities.6 Others, such as the Mosley baronets and most of the country gentlemen and squires, tended to have their estates in just one spot.7 Regardless, however, those landlords were both people whom could be approached by their tenants and who cared, often deeply, about the communities from which they came.8 They built improved housing for farmers and agricultural laborers, paid gargantuan sums for agricultural improvements like tile drainage and enclosure, and donated large sums, often on a recurrent basis, to local charities.9
Inevitably, some were feckless or greedy and tended more toward squeezing the land for everything they could get out of it rather than working with their tenants and improving it. The rents paid by their tenants were often lower, their agents were often willing to forget missed past payments from farmers that couldn’t make ends meet, and, when they owned industrial or mining entities, those were generally known for treating their workers better than when such ventures were owned by new money plutocrats.10 The Fitzwilliam mines, for example, were the model for coal mining safety and relatively good treatment of miners.11
Much of that old system passed with the first half of the twentieth century. The demands of the Great War and early death duties, along with the agricultural slump that hit Britain in the 1880s, led to the first great wave of sales in the post-Great War “Indian Summer” of the aristocracy.12 Then came the Second World War and confiscatory death duties of sometimes 90%; those led to the dismantling of all but the luckiest and strongest great estates, such as those of the Duke of Westminster.13 Most of the gentlemen and squires for which the Regency was famous were wiped out, and even the peers faced significantly straightened finances.14
But, while now gone, in large part, thanks to both economic conditions that have depressed the rental value of farmland and government policy that tends toward breaking up the great estates, it remains a model of landlordism that “works.” The landlords, because of their ties to localities, were generally understanding and lenient with their tenants, paid for much of the improvement that made British agriculture the best in the world, had the capital to fund the Industrial Revolution, and used their resources for investment and supporting careers in less remunerative professions like soldiering or politics. There were always exceptions and feckless spending, but, generally, it worked as a system for landlords and tenants.
Aristocratic Ownership as Distinguished from Feudalism
Significantly, that situation was different from serfdom, or medieval feudalism. Though the peers and, to a lesser extent, gentry, retained some of the local influence they had in Medieval and Renaissance times, the economics were different.
Rather than just owning the land and investing in some industries, as the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian landowning aristocracy described above, medieval lords ruled over the serfs with an iron fist and squeezed them economically in every way possible. They took their rent for the land, of course, but also squeezed the serfs by such practices as owning the only grain mill in the area and requiring the local serfs to sell their grain to and get their flour or bread from it, extracting a massive fee in the process. Similarly, they tended to own the brewery and sell beer or ale at uneconomic prices, control the userers who extracted painful levels of interest from the serfs, and engaged in similar processes to squeeze the lemon of the serfs for all they were worth.
It was, then, a system characterized (very simply and generally speaking) by near-complete ownership of the inputs and outputs, with a heavy fee extracted for the use of them, by the lord, with the serfs controlling only the elements that involved risk and little remuneration. Further, the lord was cold, distant, and mostly unapproachable or, at best, a difficult master with whom it was difficult to reason or negotiate given his near-total control and the vast disparity in resources.
Thus, the later English land system that was dominant for much of the 18th and 19th Centuries was different from serfdom in that, though it was somewhat paternalistic, the landowners were less likely to abuse their position to squeeze everything out of the farmers and laborers in their area of control.
American Land Ownership
America, as a colony of Great Britain, originally saw some features of the English land system.15 In the cavalier-dominant southern states, for example, great estates dotted the land and the ideal of both hereditary aristocrats like the Lees and Washingtons and of new men like Andrew Jackson was to be a landed gentleman.16 We had no titles or peerage, but the lifestyle of the southern planters was, to the extent they were able, something like the lifestyle of the gentry, particularly the country gentlemen. They lived off the income from their land, which others farmed, and pursued careers in law, politics, and the military, like their English role models, not careers in industry or trade like the Yankees and English middle class.
That changed, however, by the end of the War Between the States. The end of slavery meant tenant farming in the South, which was far less remunerative than the antebellum plantation style of farming. The Yankee North, meanwhile, had settled on the small-scale Homestead Acts style of settling the Great Plains and West. Initially, that meant a plethora of small farms across the land rather than vast, latifundia-style plantations.
Small-scale ownership across the West changed, however, as the 19th Century progressed and turned into the Gilded Age.17 While some Homestead Act farms stayed with families, those were generally not economic. The family had to work outside of agriculture to earn a living, as the sheer scale of farmland opened up meant that grain prices plummeted, and a hundred acres or so wasn’t able to generate enough income for an American family. Further, they couldn’t justify the purchase of the expensive agricultural machinery of the sort necessary to compete in an industrializing world.18 So, aggregation ensued as family land was sold to, or virgin land was bought up by, corporate entities.
Those were able to raise the capital necessary to buy the expensive machinery and farm enough land to make such machinery worthwhile. That process has continued since, with American agriculture largely being defined, particularly in the Midwest, by huge farms farmed using vast amounts of machinery and fertilizer either by a corporation or a family. But, even when family farms survived, it was in a far different form than contemplated by the Homestead Act.
Thus perished the small-scale farm of yeomen at the hands of economic “progress” and the rigors of competing in an industrializing world. And, even when family farms large or small survived such changes, they became ever more at the mercy of agriculture-focused companies, particularly the meat processors of the Tyson mold.
Onward to Serfdom
The central problem of modern agriculture is scale. Thanks to innovations like chemical fertilizer and “improvements” in the breeding and raising process that make it easier for farmers to raise vast numbers of meat animals, particularly chickens, there’s a plethora of food. We swim in a sea of cheap calories. The problem for the agricultural side of that equation is that, if the food Americans buy is cheap, the farmers get an even lower price when they well it. That amount they receive must, theoretically, cover their costs and deliver a profit. Further, they must figure out to whom to sell. Farmer’s markets can sell a small amount of meat and produce but aren’t a useful way of offloading tons of grain or tractor-trailer loads of chickens, and most grocery stores and restaurants don’t want to deal with a smattering of farmers all over the country.
The intermediary aspect of that equation was “solved” by huge conglomerates like Tyson that buy up the farm products, process them for sale, and then sell it to those who then sell it to individuals that need groceries or restaurant supplies. So, farmers can sell to an intermediary rather than trying to find a point farther down the supply chain.
However, there’s an issue with that system: the conglomerates have a huge amount of power. The four big meat packers, for example - Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef - control 85% of the US beef market.19 They own the slaughterhouses and meat packers, so farmers have, generally, no one else to whom they can sell other than the local monopoly. Who has more power: Tyson, which completely controls purchases of beef in a zip code, or a rancher that sells a few dozen meat cows a year? Tyson, obviously.
That process had disastrous results for ranchers, particularly when paired with refrigerated shipping, making beef from around the world cheaper and the government outlawing country of origin labels.20 That problem is similarly severe in poultry production, and, in both cases, corporate power is being used to turn farmers into serfs. Next, we’ll explore how.
Beef Serfs
Predictably, consolidation in the beef industry has led to low prices for producers, and those low prices are forcing ranchers out of work as independent farmers and into various odd jobs to stay afloat. Such is what American Prospect noted in a 2021 report, saying:21
Financial hardship for independent ranchers is universally felt. Around a thousand miles northwest of Stokes’s ranch, at the foot of the Sandhills in eastern Nebraska, David Wright is a fourth-generation cattle rancher who shares Stokes’s passion for ranching. But as he repeated a few times in a phone call last week, “It’s a great life, but it’s a terrible way to make a living.”
In the last three decades, this has become more acute. Economic consolidation across the beef industry has made the once comfortable livelihood of small- and medium-sized ranchers nearly untenable. In Nebraska, Wright described watching young farmer after young farmer squeezed out of the cattle industry and forced to drive semitrucks or work at fertilizer plants to pay off debts. He says nearby farmers were pushed to abandon their cattle and farms after being priced out by the same culprit: Big Beef.
The stranglehold on the beef industry can be traced to the processing and packing companies at the center of the market. Ranchers and legislators say that the four major meatpacking companies—the “Big Four,” as ranchers call them—are to blame. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef purchase and process 85 percent of beef in the United States, giving them immense economic control. They operate at the nefarious nexus of being both regional monopsonies and monopolies, having a significant sway on both the price of cattle bought off the ranch and the price of beef bought at the supermarket. These four middlemen firms are both the buyers and sellers.
Think of these mega-companies as occupying the slim center of an hourglass. They control how the meat moves from the top of the hourglass, from ranchers, to the bottom of the hourglass, to consumers. Since 2015, the prices of cattle and retail beef have moved in opposite directions; cattle prices have decreased by 35 percent while retail prices have increased by 8 percent. For the major meatpacking companies, buying low and selling high translates into much bigger profits.
In other words, corporations have managed to become local or regional monopolies and then use that power to squeeze independent ranchers, pushing down the prices they receive for the cattle, while simultaneously raising prices for consumers. In so doing, they’re squeezing small ranchers out of their family lands and a line of work they have done for generations and love.
Congress noticed the issue as well. Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, fired off a letter alongside a bipartisan group of 27 other senators in which they demanded AG Merrick Garland investigate uncompetitive practices from the big meat packers. In it, he wrote:22
In the last several years, the price of live cattle in the United States market has plummeted, while the price of boxed beef has significantly increased, raising consumer prices at the grocery store. Concurrently, the major packing companies realized significant profits, while both U.S. beef consumers and independent cattle producers paid the price. These large price disparities are leading independent cattle producers to go broke and causing consumers to pay an unnecessary, over-inflated premium on beef.
These difficulties faced by consumers and producers are not experienced by meatpackers. For example, in the past decade, there have been repeated instances in the market which demonstrates a disconnection between the price of live cattle purchased by meatpackers and the value of choice beef cutout sold by meatpackers (see chart 1; the gap between these two values is isolated and displayed in chart 3). These persistent irregularities reveal an unfairness in the producer-meatpacker relationship and possibly anticompetitive behavior in the beef industry.
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In the last several years, the price of live cattle in the United States market has plummeted, while the price of boxed beef has significantly increased, raising consumer prices at the grocery store. Concurrently, the major packing companies realized significant profits, while both U.S. beef consumers and independent cattle producers paid the price. These large price disparities are leading independent cattle producers to go broke and causing consumers to pay an unnecessary, over-inflated premium on beef. These difficulties faced by consumers and producers are not experienced by meatpackers. For example, in the past decade, there have been repeated instances in the market which demonstrates a disconnection between the price of live cattle purchased by meatpackers and the value of choice beef cutout sold by meatpackers (see chart 1; the gap between these two values is isolated and displayed in chart 3). These persistent irregularities reveal an unfairness in the producer-meatpacker relationship and possibly anticompetitive behavior in the beef industry.
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In the last 30 years, there has been no major expansion of beef packing capacity in the United States. Beef packers continue to bring foreign beef into their facilities and place “Product of the U.S.A.” on the final product. This is, at the very least, highly misleading and undermines the price and quality of U.S. beef. Without mandatory country of origin labeling for beef – packers are provided a federal sanction to undercut American producers and dupe American consumers.
U.S. meatpackers also take advantage of their vast resources to hold what is known in the industry as a captive supply. Through forward contracting and formula based sales, packers, collectively, can easily predict their needs many months in advance. These captive supply practices allow meatpackers to exert more control, limit competition and depress sales in the live cash market.
Here are Charts 1 and 3, as referenced above:
American Prospect described how those practices work to keep ranchers in thrall to the big companies. It reported:23
Packers own “feeder cattle” that they place with ranchers or their own feedlots. And through “forward contracts” and exclusive purchasing agreements, ranchers sell at prearranged prices to the packers, divorced from supply and demand. This creates “captive supply” for the packers, increasing their control over how many cattle they purchase and at what price.
So, the “Big Four” meat packers have turned independent ranchers into struggling serfs. They’re in thrall to the local monopoly for selling the cattle, giving them little ability to set a price and turn a profit, and, because they’re dealing with monopolies, have little ability to push back on such practices as exclusive purchase agreements for low prices.
Perhaps that’s not serfdom, but it sounds little different than a lord of the manor owning the fields and the grain mill and extracting rents from the peasants both as a fee for land and in a fee for using the grain mill, with the peasants having no alternatives and so relying on what poor terms were offered by the lord for their continued survival. At least the lord and his estate managers were people: corporations are uniquely cold, impersonal, and unwilling to bend.
Ranching was once an industry of free men, of cowboys who lived free while ranch owners like Teddy Roosevelt tamed the frontier. Now, however, the government's refusal to address anti-competitive practices and the vast reach and resources of such companies mean that ranchers are largely in thrall to corporations that want to squeeze every drop of profit from them rather than help them succeed.
The Poultry and Pork Situation Is Even Worse
While the ranching situation is bad, the situation for pork and poultry producers is even worse. Take how Tyson handles chicken production, for instance. It doesn’t handle anything having to do with raising chickens from chicks to slaughter-ready adults. That’s too risky, and is the less remunerative part of the process. So, instead, it uses its monopoly power to control every other step on the chain and then set the best terms (for it) possible with struggling farmers.
Those farmers, as Mr. Griggs outlined in his article on the subject, tend to own the land, but nothing else. Tyson owns the chickens the farmers raise. It owns and sells the feed that it allows to be given to the birds. It controls if and when sick chickens are allowed to be given chicken. But, if anything goes wrong and the chickens die, it’s the farmers who pay…despite Tyson controlling every aspect of their lives.24
Meanwhile, the farmers aren’t even paid a flat fee for the chickens they raise for Tyson, according to all Tyson’s demands. Rather, they’re in a tournament with other farmers, with those who do the best in terms of such metrics as pounds of chicken delivered per week earning the most and those at the bottom earning so little that they’re at risk of bankruptcy.25
Author Christopher Leonard, a journalist who wrote abo book about the industry called “The Meat Racket,” described how the vertically-integrated industry works in a moving article for The Week. In that article, he reported, in part:26
THE STRUGGLES ON the Yandells' farm could be observed on computers inside the offices of Tyson Foods. Tyson can measure the profitability of every square foot of space under a farmer's control, gauging how much weight the birds gained given the precisely measured amount of feed, water, and medicine Tyson provided. Tyson employees create graphs of each farm's profitability to see in real time how efficiently the farmer transforms feed into fatter chickens. The information is aggregated on computer servers at Tyson Foods' headquarters in Springdale, Ark., where engineers search through the vital statistics from farms stretching through Georgia to Delaware to Arkansas. Tyson's headquarters is the real seat of power in the new, vertically integrated meat industry.
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The Tyson plant is a self-contained rural economy. Within its fenced confines are a slaughterhouse, a feed mill, a food-processing factory, a trucking lot and maintenance shop, administrative offices, a railroad spur, and a sewage plant. Decades ago, a big meat-producing town like Waldron — which pumps out millions of pounds of chicken products each week — might have contained a small network of businesses that supported and thrived from the local meat industry. There might have been several hatcheries that provided baby chicks to farmers, one or two slaughterhouses to kill the birds when they were grown. Feed mills would have mixed raw grains into chicken food to sell to local farmers, and local trucking companies would have hauled the feed and the birds between factories and the scattered farms where chickens were raised.
Under Tyson, all these businesses have been drawn onto one property. The company controls every step of meat production. The company's control spans the lifetime of the animals it raises. Before there is a chicken or an egg, there is Tyson. The company's geneticists select which kinds of birds will be grown. The birds begin their brief life at the Tyson plant, within the heated hive of its industrial hatchery. The company produces more than 2 billion eggs a year, but none of them are sold to consumers. They are all hatched inside the company's buildings, and the chicks are transported in Tyson trucks to Tyson farms.
The Tyson trucks retrieve the birds six weeks later, bringing them back to the plant, where the chickens are hung upside down on hooks and decapitated before they travel down a disassembly line, where workers cut them apart by hand. The meat is battered, cooked, and frozen, then sealed inside airtight bags. The bags are loaded onto Tyson trucks and taken to grocery stores, cafeterias, hospitals, and restaurants around the country. From its conception until its consumption, the bird never travels outside of Tyson's ownership and control. The company collects every penny of profit to be made along the way because it owns every step in the process. The feed dealer or local trucker or slaughterhouse owner doesn't complain about the arrangement because he simply doesn't exist anymore. The money stays inside the system, with the surplus handed over to the company's shareholders.
THERE IS ONE link in the chain that Tyson has decided not to own, one part of the rural economy that the company has pushed far outside the limits of its property. While most businesses are drawn steadily into the integrator's body, the force of gravity has been reversed when it comes to the farms. The farms are dumped from the balance sheet.
The reason for this is simple. During the 1960s, Tyson Foods realized that chicken farming was a losing game. When Tyson executives examined operations at the company, they saw that farming was the least profitable, and most risky, side of the business. When they looked to invest in the future, they decided not to invest in farms. One of the people privy to those discussions was Jim Blair, who for decades was one of the company's top attorneys.
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TYSON HAS OFF-LOADED ownership to the farms, but it maintains control. The company always owns the chickens, even after it drops them off at the farm; it doesn't sell baby chicks to the farmer and buy them back when they're grown. So the farmer never owns his business's most important asset. Tyson also owns the feed the birds eat, which is mixed at the Tyson plant according to the company's recipe and then delivered to the farm on Tyson's trucks according to a schedule that Tyson dictates. Tyson dictates which medicine the birds receive to stave off disease and gain weight, and Tyson field veterinarians travel from farm to farm to check the birds' health.
Tyson also sets the prices for its birds. When the chickens arrive at the slaughterhouse, Tyson weighs them and tallies up how much it owes the farmer on a per-pound basis. When that price is determined, Tyson subtracts the value of the feed it delivered to grow the birds.
The terms and conditions of Tyson's relationship with its farmers are laid out in a contract, the single most important document for a farmer's livelihood. It ensures the steady flow of birds a farmer needs to pay off utility bills and bank debt. But for all their importance, the contracts are usually short and simple documents. While a farmer's debt is measured in decades, the contracts are often viable for a matter of weeks and signed on a flock-to-flock basis. The contracts reserve Tyson's right to cancel the arrangement at any time.
Similarly, in an interview, Leonard addressed the serfdom comparison more directly, noting:27
It was years of reporting on the ground in the small towns where Tyson Foods operates, where most of the big meat companies in my book operate. A serf was a peasant and the lowest-ranking person in the feudal system of agriculture many hundreds of years ago. A serf didn’t really own their own land, and importantly they were tied to a lord who told them what to do.
To be honest, I found a very similar situation when I went to small towns like Waldron, Ark., where Tyson Foods has an enormous chicken production facility and where it contracts out with farmers to raise chickens.
Contract farming is a very interesting structure. You’ll have a farmer who will borrow maybe $500,000, maybe as much as $2 million, to build a large industrial footprint of these kinds of factory farms where they can raise 25,000 chickens in a single barn. But for all the size, scale and sophistication of these farms, the farmer never owns the actual chickens that are put into these barns. The farmer contracts with a company like Tyson, and Tyson will come and deliver birds and deliver feed. The farmer is paid to raise animals.
The farmers have almost no control over the most important things in the operation. The farmer has no control over what quality of chicks are delivered to the farm, whether they are healthy or not. The farmer doesn’t control what kind of feed is delivered to the farm. So essentially they end up taking orders from a big company like Tyson Foods in the same way a serf might be tied to a lord many, many years ago.
Thus, poultry production is much like being a serf of Europe’s dark days. Tyson hatches the chicks, sells the feed, allows or disallows giving them medicine, processes the chickens, and sells the processed chicken. It extracts its rents along every step of the process, grants terrible terms to farmers, and is not unlike a feudal lord forcing the serfs to use his grain mill at extortionate rates. Meanwhile, all the risk is on the farmers, an assumption of risk for which they are not rewarded. Rather, Tyson can cancel at any time, leaving the farmers in a lurch.
The American Prospect noted the similarity to serfdom as well. In an article on how Tyson takes advantage of chicken farmers, it noted:28
The arrangement that Tyson offered Tawr, now 44, sounded easy. He wouldn't have to buy chickens, wouldn't have to take the birds to market and find the best buyer, and wouldn't have to do any marketing to sell directly to customers. Tyson would provide the birds, feed, antibiotics, and any other supplies he needed. All Tawr had to do was the work.
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Tawr paid $550,000 for a farm located near Summers, Arkansas -- a town so small it has no stoplight and no school -- about 30 miles outside of Tyson's headquarters in Springdale. The woman who sold it to him said the three chicken houses were too much for her to keep up. With a letter from Tyson promising him a contract, he got a loan from a private bank guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture. Tawr's contract was to become a breeder for Tyson, which meant he would keep and breed hens and send their fertilized eggs off to the company. The company hatches the chicks and then sends the chicks off to other farmers on contract, like Tawr, until they're ready for slaughter.
Tawr gets up at 6 A.M. to start work. His three children go to school in the neighboring town of Lincoln, which has a little more than 1,000 people. His wife works at a nearby community college, and his parents live on the farm and help breed the chickens. It takes Tawr about an hour to weigh the feed, and then he collects the first round of eggs. He takes a break in the afternoon, before going around the farm for a second time, removing dead birds and collecting more eggs. He enjoys working at home and likes his neighbors. But he only nets about $19,000 a year. (Some years he can gross as much as $120,000, but most of that goes to operating expenses. New farmers are often sold on the idea that their gross income is how much they'll actually be living on.) If it weren't for his wife's off-farm income, his family wouldn't survive.
Tawr didn't see the contract before he committed to the loan. His first contract was for one year -- that's about how long a breeder hen lives. It turned out that Tawr was relatively lucky. For many who raise broiler chickens, the contract lasts from one flock to the next. Since chicks only take five to seven weeks to become market-weight broiler chickens, it is a short turnaround. Because the contracts are tied to a particular shipment of birds, a bad flock -- due to unhealthy birds, the company sending low-quality feed, or an uncontrollable weather event -- can destroy a farmer: He or she doesn't have a guaranteed chance to recover because the company can decide not to supply a new contract.
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Companies like Tyson often demand changes or improvements to the chicken houses before a contract is renewed or sometimes on threat of terminating an existing contract. Farmers might have to make minuscule changes -- keeping the hens a few more inches apart or changing ventilation in the houses -- that end up costing a lot of money. If they don't make these changes, the terms of their contract can be changed without warning. One year, Tyson didn't tell Tawr about new space specifications for keeping his hens and sent him only 7,000 hens for each house instead of the 8,250 he'd received the year before. Tawr says that translated into a loss of between $20,000 and $30,000 in his gross income for the year. Tawr had to take out a personal loan to cover his mortgage payments. Now Tawr has two loan payments to make and believes he probably paid an inflated price for the farm itself. In Arkansas in 2000, the median house price was about $72,800, so being on the hook for half a million dollars is a much higher debt than the area's average homeowners have to support.
Further, American Prospect noted that the pork industry has followed much the same path as beef and poultry, with pork companies, including China-owned and controlled Smithfield, following in Tyson’s footsteps and controlling the hog market:29
Chicken growers have complained about the practices of companies like Tyson for years, and now those practices have spread to other industries. Companies that process pork began contracting with hog farmers in much the same way; now the cash market for hogs is nearly dead.
Support Resistance to Serfdom
This needn’t be the case. Will Harris’ White Oak Pastures and Independence Ark Farm, for example, have figured out how to avoid the system and live free rather than be serfs. They avoid the horrors of industrial agriculture, particularly as applied to chicken breeding,30 work on regenerating the soil rather than extracting from it, and avoid having to work with the anti-farmer monopolies that squeeze the profit out of agriculture for ranchers and farmers. Meanwhile, their products cost just a bit more than industrial agriculture bought from most supermarkets. It’s an easy choice for those with an extra dollar or two per pound of meat who want to help farmers live free rather than as serfs.
Sadly, however, many farmers aren’t in such a position. Either because they don’t have the time or talent for self-marketing and figuring out how to escape the monopoly matrix, they’re stuck as serfs at the whim of the big meat packers. Reform is necessary. Congress needs to use its anti-monopoly power to reform the system and stop vertically-integrated monopolies from oppressing American farmers and treating them as serfs.
If there is not reform, those large companies will continue acting as medieval lords of the worst sort: those with whom negotiation is near impossible and who control all the inputs and outputs, much to the detriment of those forced to use the inputs and attempt to make money on the outputs. Breaking up monopolies and devolving things to some form of local, smaller-scale ownership on the gentry model is probably the best way to accomplish that objective of reform.
See “The Landowners” by Sutherland and “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by Cannadine
See “The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class” by Mingay
See “The Dukes” by Masters, “English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century” by Thompson, and “The Landowners” by Sutherland
See “The Dukes” by Masters, “A Great Agricultural Estate” by the Duke of Bedford, and:
See “Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute” by Davies
See “The Gentry” by Mingay
See “A Great Agricultural Estate” by the Duke of Bedford, “English Estate Management in the Nineteenth Century” by Spring, “The Aristocracy in England” by Beckett, and “The Victorian Countryside” by Mingay
See “A Great Agricultural Estate” by the Duke of Bedford, “English Estate Management in the Nineteenth Century” by Spring, “The Victorian Countryside” by Mingay, and “The Aristocracy in England” by Beckett
See “The Aristocracy in England” by Beckett and “English Estate Management in the Nineteenth Century” by Spring
See “Aristocratic Enterprise: The Fitzwilliam Industrial Undertakings, 1795-1857” by Mee
See “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by Cannadine
See “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by Cannadine
See “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by Cannadine
See, “Andrew Jackson” by Remini
See, “American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900” by Brands
See, “American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900” by Brands