I just finished reading this book Greenhorns: the next generation of American farmers edited by Zoe Bradbury, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, and Paula Manalo. The book is a collection of essays written by new farmers. The book overall was very interesting and it makes me happy to know that this is only a sampling of all the new people who are choosing to be farmers despite the many obstacles they face. One essay in particular really jumped out at me. Samuel Anderson is the livestock coordinator at the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project in Massachusetts. The essay describes him going to the International Poultry Expo in Atlanta, GA. Because of the growing problem of small farms trying to find access to local and small-scale slaughterhouses, Anderson was working with mobile poultry-processing units that his organization trained farmers to use, so they could kill and process their own poultry for sale at local markets.
"It's a foregone conclusion in the big poultry industry that, as the University of Georgia's broiler information web page bluntly puts it, 'Having an independent broiler-growing operation is no longer feasible.' In fact, according to the site, there is actually no such thing as an independent chicken farmer anymore; 'approximately 99 percent of all broilers are produced under contract, with the remaining production occurring on integrator-owned farms [those that are owned by the same vertically integrated company that owns every stage of production, including the processing facility and the retail brand].' The argument is that small-scale production can't compete with the low prices of the ultra-efficient industrial operations...As it turns out...there are still independent chicken farmers in the world, and they've proved that it can pencil out. In 2010, three Massachusetts producers utilized a mobile poultry-processing unit to legally process their chickens. Each raised, hand-processed, and sold between eight hundred and twelve hundred, all grown on pasture. Through farmers' markets, restaurants, and presales directly to consumers, these birds fetched from four dollars and fifty cents to six dollars per pound. Some of those chickens topped thirty dollars each. Compare that to contract chicken farmers. They get paid between 3.8 and 4.6 cents per pound of live weight. That means that a particularly efficient producer might gross a whopping twenty-five cents for each bird. During the ten to fifteen years it takes a contract producer to pay off the hundred thousand dollars in up-front cost of building and outfitting a poultry house that meets Tyson's or Perdue's standards, the farmer needs to grow well over a hundred thousand birds a year just to net five thousand dollars. The savvier independent chicken farmers are making a hundred and twenty times more than the gross per-bird return of a contract broiler. One of these producers calculated her annual net return at somewhere around ten thousand dollars - raising fewer than 1 percent of the birds it would take a contract grower to get there." (p. 149-151)
I love how the University of Georgia is basically telling future or current farmers that it is impossible to be an independent chicken farmer and basically go big or go home - when I'm sure they are NOT telling them they will make a whopping quarter ($.25 cents) per chicken they raise commercially and they will have to take on a HUGE amount of debt to get started. This book and many other local, small farmers are proving this wrong every day.
This reminded me of what Joel Salatin says in The Omnivore's Dilemma when he compares the industrial food system to the Protestant Reformation. When people could read the Bible for themselves they didn't need a priest or someone else to tell them what to do or how to live - they could read and interpret Scripture for themselves. They didn't try to outlaw Catholicism or close down all the Catholic churches - they just chose to go a different way for themselves. It's the same way with the industrialized food system - we don't need more laws to ban chemicals or outlaw non-organic food. We vote with our fork and our money three times a day with what we choose to eat and if we want we can opt out of the industrialized food industry. That analogy in The Omnivore's Dilemma was really a light-bulb moment for me - I clearly saw how I could make the changes in my life that would eliminate dependence on the industrial food industry. I definitely think that despite the contrary claims of the industrial food system - bigger is NOT better when it comes to food.
One last quote from the book I loved "The best things in life - growing your own food, living and working with your neighbors, being outside in an open space - are being lost." (p. 113)
