Mar 15, 2012

Sun, Mar 1, 1942: little chickens

“We are going to get our little chickens next week so suppose I'll be busier than ever.  Did you get your clothes, popcorn and mute O.K.?
“Hope you are well and write us again when you get time.
“Lots of Love
“Mother”
-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, March 1, 1942.  (Note that my grandmother washed my father’s clothes and mailed them to him, while he was in college.  Southwestern College was 30 miles from the farm.)
On my grandparents’ farm, chickens provided meat, eggs, and income.  One factor that encouraged chicken consumption and sales in World War II was that chicken, unlike pork, beef, veal, and lamb, was not rationed.  My grandparents purchased certified white Leghorn chicks from the Augusta Hatchery and sold eggs back to the hatchery at a premium, because of their pedigree.  As was typical in many households, women cared for the chickens on my grandparents’ farm.  It was my primarily my grandmother and my aunt who cared for the chicks and later collected the eggs, although my father fed them as well and had the job of cleaning out the chicken house on Saturdays.
While the Augusta Hatchery was a small operation by modern standards, my grandparents’ connection to it was part of a trend toward greater specialization in livestock production and a decline in the self-sufficiency of farms.  The local hatchery could monitor its breeding program more precisely to increase egg production in its birds.  In addition, Gene Schofield of the Augusta Hatchery, regularly visited my grandparents’ farm to supervise conditions in their brooding house and prescribe remedies for sick chickens.  This was a step away from more traditional farming, where chickens simply reproduced on the farm.
           Chicken raising and people’s relationship with chickens have changed radically in the seven decades since my grandmother got those chicks from the hatchery.  Lots of Americans, including myself, see problems with the transformation of poultry production in the postwar years: declining animal welfare, declining human health from increased meat consumption, loss of the efficiencies that come from combining animal and plant production, a basic loss of knowledge of where our food comes from. But my father never expressed any regret about these trends which meant he probably never had to clean out a chicken house or slaughter a chicken after he left the farm.
Like most Americans, he welcomed these changes.
Before they were hidden away in factory farms, chickens were much more present in Americans’ daily lives.  Most country kids and many urban kids in 1940s knew from an early age the details of raising, caring for, and slaughtering chickens.  With chickens close at hand, people consumed more eggs.  Americans ate about 310 eggs per person per year in 1942 and only about 240 eggs in recent years.  Chicken meat, however, was more a by-product of egg production than a primary goal. It was a way to get rid of birds that did not produce eggs: roosters and older hens.  Before the factory farming revolution and marketing success of products like Chicken McNuggets, Americans ate about a fifth as much chicken meat as they do today: 15 pounds of poultry meat a year in 1942 vs. 73 pounds by 2007.   
Leghorns, such as those on my grandparents’ farm, descended from chickens first brought to United States from rural Tuscany in the mid-nineteenth century, their name deriving from an anglicisation of Livorno, a Tuscan port.  This breed has provided a great deal of the genetic stock of the standard factory-farmed caged laying hen of today.  Through breeding programs, and changes in feed, lighting, and housing, egg production has increased dramatically. (Factory-farmed laying hens generally do not receive antibiotics or hormones, unless they are sick.) These hens produce up to 270 eggs a year nowadays, while typical hens produced around 100 eggs a year in the 1940s.
 In the decades after World War II, egg and chicken meat production became highly specialized and vertically integrated.  Small-scale operations like that of my grandparents are now a tiny part of the industry.  The number of farms growing chickens went from about 1.6 million in 1950 to about 27,000 today.  The majority of these broiler operations work under contracts with one of the four large chicken processors – Tyson, Perdue, Pilgrim’s Pride and Sanderson – which sell them chicks and dictate their production methods.  Egg production is highly consolidated as well. The 180 or so egg-producing companies with flocks over 75,000 hens represent 95% of all layers.
  Sources: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth, 1925-1952 (2009), 113-14; Marion Nestle, What to Eat [New York: North Point Press, 2007], 261; "Leghorn (chicken)" wikipedia article USDA, “Food Availability Data System”;USDA, "Farm Production, Farm Disposition and Income: Chickens and Eggs1939-1940";  Marsha Laux, "eggs profile" (Iowa State University); Ryan A. Meunier and Mickey A. Latour "Commercial EggProduction and Processing" (Purdue University); Pew Environmental Group.  "Big Chicken:Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America" (July 2011).

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