Beak Capitalism, Part 2: The Chickenization of Everything
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We just lived through a truly wild presidential race, pitting a democrat who wasn't on the ballot until june and a republican who was convicted on thirty four felony counts just before receiving his party's nomination for president. But the wildest thing might have been this guy, if you already believe in the construction, you're just signing something you already believe. And you can want a million dollars. That's awesome. I'm max chafin in this is citizen iron three part series from ironic where we investigate iron mosques and precedented support for Donald trump while you on in on apple podcast or where would you like to listen?

Bomberg audio studios, dcs radio news.

But besides being a good eight layer, the chicken of tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Here's an example of the progress that's .

been made already.

Notice how reading has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look at that drum stick.

This bird was fatten .

in the same length of time and on the same amount of feed is the other one. Thank your own guesses that which is the more profitable to raise.

For much of america's history, chickens look different to the way they do today. They were thin, elegant, even slim and upright. The average bird weight about two and a half pounds in the one thousand nine hundred years. And chickens were raised differently, too, on small farms and homesteads. The birds and their eggs provided a valuable source of extra protein and the occasional sunday roast for millions of americans.

But today, chickens are front loaded, feared breaks. After years of commercial reading, the weight of your one of the mile roster has more than doubled to a chunky five or six pounds, way more than chickens of the past.

Chickens, as our great grandparents would have understood them, looked very different from chickens today. They were scaly, they were ranging er, they could move around a barnyard and they could flap up into trees and avoid predators. And that's almost nothing like the chicken s that we eat today.

So if you went back to the time of, I I guess, our great grandparents, let's say, at the beginning of the twentieth tury, people didn't eat chicken that often. And that seems very bizarre ous. Now, in the era when there are a million forms of chicken nuggets in the cold case at the supermarket, and there is a chicken sandwich on every corner, but chicken used to be kind of special.

Welcome to the second installment of the capitalism are all loot special series, in which we are examining the U. S. Economy through the lens of chicken. If you haven't listened to our first episode where we talked about chicken Prices and the consumer experience of eating chickens and eggs, you should definitely go back and .

do that in this episode. We're going to focus on the birds themselves and the people. They grow them, because chicken actually is a lot to say about the structure of the labor market two and the relationship between big companies and their workers. And the lot has changed from the .

backyard birds of yesteryear.

To understand what's happened to chickens and the people who grow them, IT helps to consider where they started from. Marine mechanic is a journalist and author who specializes in public health, and he wrote a book called, appropriately enough, big chicken.

As we said, chickens used to be a lot smaller. Families might keep a few eggs yers in their backyards, and once of the birds reached the end of their lying life, they might be put in the proverbial pot. One key thing is that chicken meat for a long time was a tree, not a stable.

Now as a rule, older chickens happen running around the backyard, don't usually taste as good. They're leaner, they are cheered and they're just aren't that many of them compared to today's industrial scale farming. But things started to change in the one thousand nine hundred years. In nineteen thirties, to satisfy increased demand for chicken meat, farmers started scaling up and raising their birds in big chicken houses. We will talk more about those in just a little bit.

Then in the one thousand nine and 5， after the second world war, something big happened under way to big chicken .

to understand where the industrialized of chicken comes from. And and after that, the industrialized of almost all the other proteins that we eat, you really have to go back to the middle, to the end of world war two. And a couple of things are happening at the same time.

The first is that there's a war on and there's a lot of soldiers and sailors deployed around the globe who need to be fed. So there's a great deal pressure on meat producers to increase their production pressure that goes away when the war is over and when that guaranteed market from the military forces suddenly vanishes, leaving them pretty over extended. The second is that immediately afterworld war two kind of extraordinary ily.

There are a number of extreme weather events in growing areas around the globe. There are typhoons, es, and there are storms. And this is added to the destruction of growing areas that occur r during the war, and the destruction of naval fleets and of fishing vessels. So there's both an over extension of meat production and also a sense of fragility of the food system is.

against this backdrop, the biologist Thomas joke under the picture, with more and more chickens now being kept in big houses, the birds were no longer able to forage for bugs and robes and grins on their own. They need to help to survive indoors. And that where .

jokes comes in, jokes was attached to a team that had produced the first antibiotic of the torcy clans that we still use today. IT was called oreo micon. He also happened to have been given an assignment to address the dietary needs of chickens because part of the issue of the meat industry feeling over extended after the end of world war two that they thought they needed to cut costs.

This is actually the point at which we start entering into the part of american agricultural history, where livestock starts getting fed a lot of Green. But there was concerned that grain didn't have a full nutritional profile, and so they were looking for inexpensive supplements. And in a very famous experiment, jokes bought a whole bunch of baby checks, divided them into groups, gave each group some kind of supplement that was available on the market at the time.

Cod liver oil synthesized vitamines priors east, and to one group he gave the ground up dried remains of the growing medium in which his company's drug had been made, or micon. And when he assessed the results of the experiment on Christmas day, one thousand and forty eight, he found that the chicks in his experiment, who had been given the orio mice and leftovers, had gained more weight than any other set of animals in the experiment. And from that recognition, an entire history of giving antibiotics to animals began jokes called that effect growth promotion. And they have failed for a patent.

So the introduction of growth promoters helps the birds survive the great indoors and get bigger. But that wasn't the last of the chicken revolution.

One was the chickens themselves changed physically, thanks largely to the U. S. Department of agriculture, which in the late one thousand four years, in early one thousand hundred and fifties, sponsored a contest among chicken greeters called the chicken .

of tomorrow po oro. You can take IT regretted that every hand is earning your keep, even though laying an eg ought to be easy for any chicken.

that's.

Reducing big well.

And the idea of the chicken of tomorrow contest was to make chickens media to produce a bird that would have more breasts, that would be big enough to to feed a family, which was kind of hard at that point for of four or five percent family, to eat one chicken and be satisfied, and also to be very predictable in a number of ways to be a single breed. And after a couple of years of competition, the chicken of tomorrow contest produced the prototype for the most of the chickens that are raised today, blocky, muscles White, fathered, docile, not interested in running around a barnyard and flapping up into a tree, content to sit in one place.

So anti BIOS and breeding help turn the chicken of tomorrow into the chicken of today.

Well, that's not quite all, actually, a lot of things were happening on the chicken innovation front around that time.

The second thing that drove the difference between the chicken of yesterday and the chicken of tomorrow is that we changed our orientation to how we eat chicken from buying birds that were whole and had to be roasted or cut up into pieces and had to be pan fried or boiled into a source of protein that was disassembled at the manufacturing level into things like nuggets, so that people could consume chicken without having to deal with the physical reality of a.

it's hard to imagine a world without chicken nuggets. Ts, now, but as marine lays out, IT wasn't until the one thousand nine hundred and sixties that these became a thing, and IT was a very deliberate decision. After all, if you want to sell more chicken, you have to get people to eat more chicken.

And one way of doing that is giving them more options to consume IT. And then, boom, the chicken nugget was born. And these little nugget of chicken proved to be pure gold for some businesses .

like mcDonald mcDonald's.

Uh, yes. And so you might be surprised to find out that mcDonald's and actually invent the chicken nugget. Here's marin again.

So we all think of the chicken nuggets as a creation of mcDonald. And certainly mcDonald would claim that the chicken nugget is there thing introduced in the late 7。 By nineteen eighty, they were blowing the doors off in the the mcDonald's restaurants where they were sort of secretly introduced.

But it's pretty widely understood in the poetry industry that mcDonald shouldn't get all the credit because the prototype, the predecessor of the mcDonald chicken nuked, was actually invented by a kind of tankeru scientist in a basement laboratory at cornell university, a guy named Robert Baker, who was not primarily interested in chicken, but rather was interested in essentially how to avoid food waste. And he was very troubled by how much of the corcus of a chicken goes to waste. And he wanted to find ways to use as much of the circus as possible, as much of the meat on the circus as possible.

And he came up in this basement laboratory with a bunch of graduate students, with things that we now take for granted in supermarkets. Chicken, chicken, chicken cold cuts, chicken sausages. But his signature contribution to the future of chicken was a thing that he called the chicken stick model some degree on fish sticks, which had been introduced about ten years, or air.

The chicken stick was chopped, formed, pressed, chicken meat sucked off the bones, covered with a redded coding, frozen and frozen in such a way that when you took IT out of the freezer and fried or baked IT, the coding wouldn't disassemble from the rest of the meat. That was a kind of secret process that Baker invented, but I didn't stay a secret. IT was released in an agricultural extension bulletins that cornell published and sent all over the country.

They didn't in any way attempt to keep any IP in this. And as a result, the idea of something that looked like a chicken nuked was out there in the world. And seventeen years later, out came the mcDonald snugged.

Suddenly a lot more of a chicken could be used. And thanks to antibiotics and greeting, there was more chicken around to sell.

One way to think about IT is that raising chickens went from being a really small scale agricultural process to more of an industrial thing. There's a reason it's called factory farming. After all, the idea is to produce as much meat as you can at the lost possible cost, and then use that as efficient as possible. And to do that, you need standardization, new technology in the form of growth promoters and scale.

I really think we can say that it's because of antibiotic that we have the modern industry scale meat production that we have today without that early use, biotics is growth promoters. No one would have understood that you could actually produce animals almost like widget in a kind of Henry ford model. And so once people moved to doing that, then IT made sense for farms to get larger and for profit to increase. And for farms to get larger, you had to protect animals against being held in more crowded conditions, traditionally, would have been in smaller, open farms.

The upside of all of this is that we get plentiful White me, all the stuff that goes into delicious sandwich and convenient chicken nuggets. The downside is a lot of that comes at the expensive of the animals themselves. And as we're about to see also the farmers who grow them.

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of future results.

Success is more than the final destination. It's a path you take one step at a time. It's discipline, it's teamwork and it's the drive and passion in the side of us that comes before all recognition.

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There's another seminal moment in the transformation of america's chicken industry, one that has more to do with where they're grown and by whom.

in one thousand and twenty three, a deliver housewife by the name of the sea long steel, by the way, great name. Got a surprise .

in the mail, SHE had ordered .

fifty baby chicks, but the male man came to the door with five hundred chicks instead.

Instead of sending the hundreds of extra checks back in the mail, scio decided to make due. SHE kept them in a car board box and set about building a shed to house them over the next five months or so. He raised the chicks to adult hood, flattening them up and eventually selling them to local hotels and restaurants as a delicious meal. Then he decided to do IT all over again. Soon he was ordering a thousand chicks, then ten thousand, and then he just kept going.

So it's a seal. Poniard is the first boiler house, a big step in the history of poultry farming. Today, chicken s are raised in huge barns to cost large amounts of money to build in. In order to keep these big Barnes fill the chickens, farmers have to participate in something called the tournament system.

In fact, everything about modern chicken is big. In the tournament system, farmers get baby chicks from large chicken greeters. They're called integrators, companies like tyson, purdue or pilgrims de. And then they raise them using feed and growth promoters sent to them by those same companies. Eventually, the mature birds are handed back to the chicken company that sold them as babies, and they fulfill their chicken destiny of becoming sandwich nuggets or other snacks.

Basically, what we do is we supplied the buildings in the labour and other stuff needed to ask you raise birds for big. They call integrators, or chicken companies like a tin or product, actually owns the chicks, and they actually owned the feed and back nations and that sort of thing.

Meet greg watts. He's a former contract pull try producer who raised chickens in north CarOlina as part of the tournament system.

We specially a few hours, we and if we raise them up to market age, they give some guidelines doing that. And then they can pick them up and then we get ready and start all over again.

IT all sounds pretty simple and efficient. And the integrators themselves argue that they're basically taking on the messier, more difficult and more capital intensive parts of the chicken business, like hatching chicks, transporting them back and forth to farmers and then processing them into chicken nuggets and so on.

So that's the tournament system. But crag crag calls IT something different. Basically.

what IT boils down to is who can get the chicken to the plant, the quick kest. You can get that chicken the fastest on the least amount of feed, least amount of feed me, least amount of cost. So and and that sounds perfect. I mean, you figure things out, you grass concepts, you tweet things, do what you have to do.

And if you work smarter and you work harder in the next guy, you're going get comp, say a little more perfect, right? It's going to flow in this whole syn leave because every week if you have ten goals go out, you're gonna some that make at or above the base pay, which my base pay where thing was around, but at the point at that time and you're going to have five or so added the t and that are at base or below, right? So they take the bonuses to the five rows that are above average is taken from the pay of the grows that are below average.

So for the company is as some game, they only going have a nick invested and a pound. The pass, so to speak, is fine. Like the size of the par is finite, the former is fighting or the slice.

So in the tournament system, you're basically graded on a curve. You are chicken farmer who does well relative to other growers in the area. You'll get more money from the pot and the ones who do badly get less money from the same time. So you want to be entire relative other growers.

When crack decided to become a farmer, competing against his fellow chicken growers for pay wasn't quite what he had in mind. In fact, let's go back to how crag got into the chicken business in the first place back when he saw a big opportunity when purse started building a processing plant just seven miles south of his home.

they were looking for farmers to contract with to build buildings to raise their birds. I saw advertisement in the paper. I called the representation.

We had a meeting. He gave me an incoming and expense kind of performance sheet. IT won't get rich.

Quick, I take to my count. He cash floated there again. IT was steady, but I would get rich, but IT was enough and get form. Credit was excited about the possibility of a moena area might be the best thing that ever happened to form a.

rob and county said there was things one OK. At first, crag spends days monitoring his birds, making sure they weren't overheating or getting sick, or eating too much or too little, basically following the instructions and the chicken growing rules sent by predict.

The first thing I would do, I would wake up and I would go, and I would open all the house up, and I would just basically stick my head in a look, and I would. And then we had a control, rounded the the monitor things from, and I would make sure that the controller was, sit properly, they are the computer, but it's basically a lofa thera best, where you can control all the temperature in span, setting that of stuff from a location.

So look at all that and make everything was right. You take nip test, is monie up, is a good, you know, is is the house to humid know, and what the first look like, all they spread out cost, or the he act, or they hold up, or they painting a lot of observations and school, but not come. Then I actually physically walk through the houses and now would look for birds I head, dad, or maybe were deformed, or just maybe weren't performing as I should.

And either I pick up the dead, we would have to call out. And just, just a nice word for kill. First, IT weren't going to make IT the entire six weeks, you know, for whatever reason.

but there was a limit to what treg could do for his flock. After all, the integrators of the one sending him, the baby birds themselves, they on the chicken s and are the ones making decisions about what they eat, what medicines they get, what conditions they kept in and how much room they have to grow up.

And the deal was, as each of my houses were twenty thousand square feet, well, they put thirty thousand birds in every house. So when those pickers were, they had the same amount of space all the time. But when they got market age, I mean, that I was all a wall in the end, just a sea of White chicken s so if you do the math, thirty thousand chicken s and twenty thousand square feet is point six seven square fit per bird.

So there were those issues within the structure, the system that I had no control over that is not cruel, but it's not about quality of life for or an animal by any change about her margin, which and get to the plan. These chickens traits have been selected over the years that were what they are and the americans desire for White me, just what drove what we call the Frank and chicken. The breast is very long, oversize compared the recipes body.

They do have trouble standing, and they very, they not a, they were barely stay long enough to get to the plant. So what they do is they take a by the feet, they take a drank water, they sit down. I called IT three steps, ts and flop that that's what they do all day in two .

thousand eight can reach the tipping point. Frustrated by a particularly people flock loppy to .

say that ten times fast.

frustrated by a particularly people flock of floppy chick's, he filed the conditions in his own chicken house and uploaded them to youtube to send to his production manager at produce. Soon after, he partnered with a reporter and an animal rights to vist to produce expose and chicken firming.

Crag has no control over the health or genetics of the chicks that are delivered to him by. Bound by contract, crag is not even allowed to give them sunshine or fresh air. Just thirty seven days later, they are a sea of painting.

Birds pending indicates birds are overheated. These birds find IT too painful to bear the weight of their unnaturally large breasts on their legs. Cc watts ultimately proved to be something of a reneging for each part.

A produce spokeswoman said IT works with over eighteen hundred poultry farmers in the retention rate, with those contracts around ninety eight percent. In a statement to od lots, they also said it's been nearly ten years since watch was a former for purdue, and at that time, IT has established former advisory councils together. Important feedback and insights from them on how the company can improve.

But crags complaints about the imbaLance of power in the poultry industry and the health of the birds are things that come up again and again in our conversations. Chicken farmers, for instance, Karen crush field SHE goes by. Susie was a contract growing for time for many years, but SHE started out .

raising cows. We .

already had a cattle form, and so we wanted to kind of expand out and add something else, some more income coming in. The difference in a farming cattle and and farming chick's is farming cattle. You on all the input you on the cattle you get, you the you decide what top of Carol you're buy.

You decide what time they leave your form. You decide the breeding periods. All of IT is decided by you and you are I truly independent cattle farmer.

You're independent. You don't have nobody giving you orders or telling you what you need, what says, what kind of feed with chickens. It's totally different with chickens.

You have no control over any of the inputs. They deliver the chickens at that time. They give on the feed that they want them to have. They pick up on their time.

They tell you what to do in controlling the inputs in the house, what temperature needs to be, what size you need a little money into full as they control all of the inputs you were only I serve more less. You just have to do what I tell you. And actually, it's more like your employee.

So for susie, following the instructions of the chicken integrator was a must, because if you don't, you risk of losing out on that contract and you might not have any other companies to sell chicken s too.

For porter goes, there is no option of going independent because there's nothing you can do with your barns, separate chickens for taste or quite ever integrate. Ter, as the occasion had to be in my area, uh, to son was the only company in the area that we could go to. So if your houses were shut down, they were just shut down. You had no house to go, or anything else you could do with your born's other then maybe put high, you know, that was the only other, the option you had. You could not grow chickens in them again.

The borns are really expensive, and the farmers are often on their own. When IT comes to building them, even though the integrators may be the ones asking for improvements, which is exactly .

what happened to suit ties and food started doing upgrades probably in the miana is. And each time they decided to do upgrade, IT kept costing more money. IT was bigger upgrades than forward.

And so the last update that they call for us to do was in two thousand and ten, they sent a letter out saying that we had to do all of these upgrade. One of the upgrade s that I requested us to do at the time was add two extra role lights, just one master upgrade. And IT was gonna up, costing us over three hundred thousand dollars to upgrade.

And IT. Would I actually cost on the two older houses that would build to eighty seven? IT was going to cost us more than we had originally build the houses for the poor and h. So at that point, we said, no, we're not going to do any more upgrades.

The infinitive partition to expert upgrades is keep the growth in that as long as the grow in death, they are going to do exactly test and tells them if they get at a date, then they have more freedom aside. No, I don't want to do that and i'm not going to do that. And if they catch you off, then you ve got everything possible. But if you a million dollars in, did and gone to lose your home, you're more likely to do what they say.

A test spokesperson did respond for comment when we reached out. They said, and I quote tyson foods contracts with the network of thousands of independent growers across the country, and we value the contributions that these growers make to our business. We depend on growers, and the contracts we have in place incentivize growers to raise high quality birds.

One contract growers who did lose IT all is Michael d. As the deer is used, their life savings to put down a deposit on fifty acres of land back in twenty eighteen with a home and four chicken houses. IT was supposed to be agricultural bliss.

Farming was something that I had always dreamed of doing. But IT wasn't something that I saw as being very feasible to do, given, given the monetary constraints. I mean, need a large bed property, need, make a lot of capital investments, take a ming, the magnetite of had ought to.

But there were other farmers in the area. They weren't poultry ary farmers, but some of them new of some poetry farms. They were friends with some of these guys.

And there was always this kind of the start process that these guys, that only these poultry forms, that you know these barriers are fifty, about five hundred feet long, some of them bigger than that, know you always felt like they were because they had a lot of capital investments. You thought they were. They must have had good cash ful.

They must have been living good lives. They were in contract with some of these household brands that you see on every grocery store shelf that they tend to start trusting, right? You see these .

names.

you know i'll pick on on others. You know, you see a name like hint ketchup, or you see a name like like horses or or whatever when i'm china lead to is you see these brands that have been in your face year after year from childhood to adulthood D A staple in our food system. So you tend to trust these brands are doing the right thing.

But Michael integrator kept asking for more investments, and he struggled to keep up on this loan payment. Michael thinks he spent something like one hundred thousand dollars and unexpected upgrades in just two years.

I kept thinking that this is just gonna sink me deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into death. This dream of me being able to pay this place off and eventually build something that generation for my family is not going to exist. I thought i'm not doing IT.

Michael D. S. Ended up selling the farm, losing his life savings in the process. He later sued his integrator, arguing that chicken farmers in the tournament system should be classified as employees of integrators instead of independent contractors. That litigation is still pending.

Susie crush field filed for bankrupcy and is still paying off a debt. Interestingly, crowds didn't lose his chicken farming contract with puri after filming his burns, but the relationship, obviously sweet crank, file a whistle, blow a complaint, produce countersuit.

depending to all three of them, are now part of the socially responsible agriculture project S R A P, where they work on a contract growing transition program, which aims to help poultry farmers navigate the thunderdome and the pile of manual, both figurative and literal, that comes with IT.

Here's my god, das again, the person that has all the risk, all the liability is, is the farmer. He's the one that's in debt for these Barnes. He's the one that's in debt for all the facilities, the upgrades, the equipment.

He's the one that's in debt that he's got to figure out. What in the world do I do with all this man that I have here on this, on this site? I've got ta get rid of that half, have nothing they can do with IT everything that is, that is a liability. The farmer has the integrators, the only one that's got anything that's able to build a profit.

Bones are back, and so is all the credit P G M fixed incomes monthly podcast series. From the latest trends to long term perspectives, you'll get timely fixed income insights from leading economists, research journalists and investment professionals. Whether your neta bones or a season investor tune in to all the credit, whether you get your this podcast is intended solely for professional investor use. Past performance .

is not a guarantee of future results.

Success is more than the final destination. It's a path you take one step at a time. It's discipline, it's teamwork and it's a drive and passion.

The side of us that comes before all recognition. It's what Steve has been doing for over one hundred and thirty years. Quietly yet strategically, Steve has become one of the fastest growing wealth management and investment banking firms in the country.

Our financial advisers go beyond traditional wealth management to provide clients with direct access to one of the industry's largest equity research franchise and a leading midd market investment. Because success is the drive IT takes to keep climbing, the passion to keep investing. The best of each of us made Better by the best in all of us. And that is where success meets success. Start your journey at Steve that come the S T I F V L C.

C N Y S C.

That is not the sound of chickens, clearly, but I promise I will be relevant in the second contract. Growers in the poultry world Carry most of the potential downside risks of chicken farming, while big chicken the integrators enjoy most of the upside. They hug the benefits and pass on the risks. And that model is becoming more common. As the state of pig farming and IOS shows.

At any given time, there are some twenty million hogs being raised in I O, making in america's biggest pig for my state. I will now produces nearly a third of america's total hawk supply.

And speaking up the newer, I always pick population. And what IT produces has become a big debate. People generally don't want to live next to big pig farms for obvious reasons.

And hugely, goons of manure can get into the water supply. One analysis of U. S, D. A data shows that the manual produced by iowa pigs has grown by almost eighty percent between two thousand.

two and two thousand. And ferry is also a member of the S. R. A. P, is an agricultural and a trust expert who group an island, had a front row seat to the state's transformation to prime pig.

As Austin points out, I I was pork industry didn't always look like this. Modern pig producers took a lot of inspiration from you guys. IT chickens.

What you still happened in the .

eighties as a state senator deregulated the park in the stern, north CarOlina, a, to allow the industry zone apart. Production, copying that model chick animation, where he owned the animal, had other people in these medal shed, he would give them his pigs, they would grow them out, and then he would sell them, butcher them.

What have you? The business ali and I OA saw was happening in north CarOlina ina, and they saw the massive amount of production increases going on there. And they were like, we're not going to lose our number one status.

We're going to gage in this race to the bottom. And actually there's a name for this chick kanisha.

We are gona chicken ize, the pork industry and iola. And if we have to kill the family farm, so beat because it's all about selling more currency, the whole supply chain around IT, maintaining that dominance, instead of having chicken behave like the other industries, IT became a race to the bottom chicken ization. Everything is being chickening. Zed, where you just apply this really abusive power structure to different modes of commodity production. Because IT shifts, the risk is part to the worker and the core pressure holder get the upside of IT.

And that's arguably helped big chicken just get bigger. Chicken is now dominated by large commercial breeds and processors, with a handful of companies commanding sixty percent of the U. S. Chicken market.

The chicken induction, pretty concentrated, is not even just the concentration of slaughter. The animal is the whole supply chain. The whole goal of the company is from the genetics of the thing that hatches to the chicken energy in the store. The whole thing has been highly vertically integrated.

so chickens have grown fatter, more horizontal. At the same time, the chicken industry as a whole has become more concentrated, more top down, more vertical, more powerful in terms of what they can extract from farmers and their birds. And that business model is spreading across agriculture and even beyond.

right? You know, people think of companies like uber is pioneering some novel business model, but the rise of independent contractors with more risk being foisted on people who resemble employees is a large and growing phenomenon.

Next up on beat capitalism, what can be done to tip the baLance of power book towards consumers and workers? It's time to talk about uncloaked the system.

Big capitalism is written by Tracy elway, common ruddy z and joy son.

though this short series was produced and edited by caron with the help of chae works and the .

fact checking of industry puns and other information was brought to by .

dashing kill the chicken ization of our regular allot steam song, and the mixing is done by our sound engineer.

brake maples. Renan num is our executive producer, and stage bowman is blimber's a podcast .

special thanks to compassion in world farmer. And if you enjoying .

this deep dive into the chicken industry, please consider leaving a positive review on your favor. Pod test platform. Thanks for listening.

Are you looking for a new podcast about stuff related to money? Well today's you're lucky day, I am not live in and i'm kt great and we .

are the host of money stuff the every friday we d dive into the top stories about wall street finance and other stuff.

We have fun, we get weird and we want you to join us.

You can listen to many stuff, the podcast on apple podcasts potier y or ever you get your podcasts.