"The Business of America is Business"

It has come to my attention I may have jumped into the the business of factory farming without first properly explaining about the business itself.  So today I'm going to back track.  Let's start with a bit of a history lesson.

Ironically, factory farming evolved a lot like an animal, and like biological evolution, it shares a common ancestry with other types of industrialized labor.  Everyone has heard of Henry Ford's invention of the assembly line, but what you may not have heard is that he got his great idea from the first industrial processing plants that popped up in the early 1800s.  That's right, animals were being treated like machines before machines were being treated like machines.  Where once we had highly trained butchers handling meat from slaughter to store, suddenly we had lines of men, each with one job involved in the slaughter of an animal, and they had some great titles.  To name a few: kill men, sticker-bleeders, tail-rippers, leggers, butters, flankers, head-skinners, head-chislers, gutters, and back splitters.  I'd explain their duties further, but I feel like they are mostly the kind of thing you can infer from the name.  So, the job of the one became the job of the many, which is nice for unemployment rates, but the farming industry has a strange way of expanding the scope of the work and narrowing it at the same time.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now, we've got these industrial assembly lines in place, and while all this is going on great advancements are being made in transportation (i.e. railroads and improved roadway systems) and the industrial revolution itself is calling for an increase in efficiency in all business in order to survive.  And so, the stage is set for factory farming to take hold, all it needed was someone to take the lead. That role would end up going to the birds.  Well, the chickens.  In the 30s, or as some lovingly refer to it "The Great Depression", the number of chickens being raised for slaughter each year skyrocketed, due to the discovery that they could be housed inside by the thousands.   Of course, that meant a farmer needed some new tricks to keep all those birds alive, and some great innovators came along to tackle the problem.  You might recognize their names-Mr. Arthur Perdue and Mr. John Tyson, some of the first (and to this day) major players in industrial agriculture.  Their operations were some of the first to introduce hybrid corn to chicken feed, which decreased costs.  Then came a practice called debeaking (another one of those terms that is exactly what it sounds like) to make it harder for chickens to attack each other living in such close quarters.  And so chickens became the first factory farmed animals in the world.  Shortly thereafter was a great big flood of changes to the lifestyle chickens were used to: sulfa drugs and antibiotics started showing up in their food, to help them grow big and "healthy."

And boy, did they grow big.  In 70 years time (1935-1995) the weight of chickens increased by 65%, which meant they could be slaughtered much sooner, and since the drugs made them so nice and fat, the amount they were fed dropped 57%.  You know America, we're all about reducing costs and increasing efficiency.  But in this case, that efficiency means we are allowing ourselves to eat malnourished animals in order to nourish ourselves.  Does that sound counter intuitive to anyone else?

Scariest part-this is just the tip of the iceberg.  I haven't even gotten to the modern players in the farming game, and I have yet to even touch on factory farming's influence on produce. We'll start next week with GMOs-genetically modified organisms.  Stay tuned.