This post has been updated; read to the end.)
A few months ago, reporting on farm antibiotic use, I met a North Carolina farmer named Craig Watts. Craig lives in a small town near the South Carolina line where his forebears have been since the Carolinas were a British colony, and for more than 20 years, he has raised broiler chickens for Perdue Farms.
Watts went into chicken farming because, where he lives, there were not many alternatives. His parents and relatives had been row-crop farmers, but after the tobacco economy began to collapse, that looked like not a great way to make a living. Out of college, he began working as a field technician for an agricultural-chemicals company, but he disliked cubicle life and wanted to get back outside. When an advance man for Perdue came calling, showing spreadsheets of how lucrative chicken farming might be, he decided to give it a try.
It worked for him at first; he said that he was, intermittently, a top earner in the slaughterhouse complex that buys his chickens. But over the years, he chafed at the economic conditions the vertically integrated business imposed on farmers, who always seemed to get the raw end of the deal, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable with what intensive farming did to the chickens themselves. He began speaking out: first writing op-eds, then testifying at a government hearing exploring unfair contract conditions, and then talking to advocates and journalists.
And now he has taken his boldest step yet -- really an extraordinary one, given the closed-door nature of most corporate farming: He has made a video, in cooperation with the animal-welfare group Compassion in World Farming, in which he escorts cameras into his broiler barns.
The video is a collaboration with Leah Garces, Compassion's US director (who introduced me to Watts last summer). They appear onscreen together, walking through his broiler flock, discussing the strict company rules he operates under, and examining the sad condition of his birds: leg deformities, ulcerated bellies from barn litter soaked with urine, chicks too frail to eat or stand.
It is difficult to watch, but it is essential to view because it is so unusual. When we see video from inside intensive meat production, it is almost always something that was shot covertly by activists working undercover, trying to document conditions that consumers would not otherwise see. For a farmer to admit to letting activists in -- and to appear with them on camera, explain the contract conditions he is compelled to work in, and document the poor health of the birds he is sent -- is unheard-of. (And, for Watts, almost certainly a breach of contract. It will be important to keep track of whether he experiences consequences from the company.)
"This stuff is not as advertised," Watts says in the video. "There's a lot of flaws in the system. The consumer is being hoodwinked. The farmer's being jerked around."
Because I write so much about antibiotic use in farming, it is important to say that Watts' farm is not, now, an antibiotics-using farm, though it was in the past. (As I covered earlier, almost all of Perdue went antibiotic-free last summer.) What he represents, instead, is a conviction among people examining livestock raising that removing antibiotics from meat production is not enough. After that is accomplished, animal welfare, and the economic conditions that farmers are forced to live under, need attention as well. (For more on those issues: The ASPCA began a campaign on broiler welfare, "The Truth About Chicken," a year ago, and the Pew Charitable Trusts have released two reports on the broiler industry, here on environmental damage and here on economic unfairness.)
One of the key points of the video is that Watts's chicken is sold under a USDA program called "Process Verified," in which the agency says it confirms that broilers are raised to a number of standards, including "humanely" -- which, from the conditions in the video, seems untrue. It slots into work that Garces and Compassion were already doing with the Better Chicken initiative, which challenges supermarkets to buy only chicken that is humanely raised.
In October, Perdue agreed as part of the settlement of a suitbrought by the Humane Society of the United States that it would no longer use the "humane" claim on one specific label. In a statement, Compassion said that is not enough:
Garces and Watts plan to continue working together to highlight the need for humane practices. I asked how how she felt about partnering with someone who, until now, represents everything she had worked against. Here's what she told me:
Update: The National Chicken Council has responded to the video in a statement. The statement, attributed to Tom Super, vice president of communications, references a column today by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof on the video. Key quote:
Update 2: Craig Watts has confirmed to me that he was visited today by representatives of Perdue performing an "animal welfare audit." The implication is that the conditions highlighted in the video are not systemic to the system, but are down to his fault as a farmer. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.