Poultry farming in the United States

"The best in the world" White Plymouth Rocks, 1910

In the United States, chickens were raised primarily on family farms or in some cases, in poultry colonies, such as Judge Emery's Poultry Colony[1] until about 1960. Originally, the primary value in poultry keeping was eggs, and meat was considered a byproduct of egg production.[2] A United States Department of the Interior census in 1840 found American farmers had a total combined poultry flock valued at approximately $12 million ($352 million in today's dollars).[3]

Following the Treaty of Wanghia between the US and China in 1844, oriental poultry breeds were imported to New England, and Rhode Island became the nation's first major poultry center.[3] Cross-breeding between English and Asian birds created new breeds still common today, like the Barred Plymouth Rock. Chickens remained primarily to provide eggs, mostly to the farmer (subsistence agriculture), with commercialization still largely unexplored. Farm flocks tended to be small because the hens largely fed themselves through foraging, with some supplementation of grain, scraps, and waste products from other farm ventures. Such feedstuffs were in limited supply, especially in the winter, and this tended to regulate the size of the farm flocks. Soon after poultry keeping gained the attention of agricultural researchers (around 1896), improvements in nutrition and management made poultry keeping more profitable and businesslike.

In 1896, farmer Nettie Metcalf created the Buckeye chicken breed in Warren, Ohio.[4][5][6] In 1905, Buckeyes became an official breed under the American Poultry Association.[7] The Buckeye breed is the first recorded chicken breed to be created and developed by a woman.[8][9][10]

Poultry shows spread interest and understanding, with 88% of all farmers having chickens by 1910.[11]

Barred Plymouth Rock hen, No. 31S. laid 237 eggs in first year at the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station (1903)

As the United States urbanized, demand for eggs grew. Eggs were sold into urban markets, where residents did not have chickens to provide eggs for themselves.[12] Except in hot weather, eggs can be shipped and stored without refrigeration for some time before going bad; this was important in the days before widespread refrigeration. With a steady demand for eggs, efforts to create a poultry egg industry began in earnest, but raising poultry remained challenging; early efforts at industrial-scale indoor poultry houses led to problems with diseases like coccidiosis, Marek's disease, and vitamin D deficiency were not well understood. Egg production was largely increased by scientific breeding rather than industrial scale. After a few false starts, such as the Maine Experiment Station's failure at improving egg production,[13] success was shown by Professor James Dryden at the Oregon Experiment Station.[14]

The culling and slaughter of non-egg laying chickens created a source of poultry meat. However, poultry meat supply continued to lag demand, and poultry was expensive. Prior to about 1910, chicken was served primarily on special occasions or Sunday dinner. For example, Herbert Hoover's campaign used the slogan "A chicken in every pot" during the 1928 United States presidential election, appealing to a middle-class sense of affluence in the Post WWI years.[15] Poultry was shipped live or killed, plucked, and packed on ice (but not eviscerated). Two kinds of poultry were generally offered: broilers or "spring chickens", young male chickens, a byproduct of the egg industry, which were sold when still young and tender (generally under 3 pounds live weight); and "fowls" or "stewing hens", also a byproduct of the egg industry, which were old hens past their prime for laying.[16] This is no longer practiced; modern meat chickens are a different breed. Egg-type chicken carcasses no longer appear in stores. In 1942, the country had its first government-approved chicken evisceration plant.[17] The "whole, ready-to-cook broiler" was not popular until the 1950s, when end-to-end refrigeration and sanitary practices gave consumers more confidence. Before this, poultry were often cleaned by the neighborhood butcher, though cleaning poultry at home was a commonplace kitchen skill.

The major milestone in 20th century poultry production was the discovery of vitamin D (named in 1922),[18] which made it possible to keep chickens in confinement year-round. Before this, chickens did not thrive during the winter due to lack of sunlight, and egg production, incubation, and meat production in the off-season were all very difficult, making poultry a seasonal and expensive proposition. Year-round production lowered costs, especially for broilers. Artificial daylight supplementation also started being used.

Improvements in production and quality were accompanied by lower labor requirements. In the 1930s through the early 1950s, 1,500 hens was considered to be a full-time job for a farm family. In the late 1950s, egg prices had fallen so dramatically that farmers typically tripled the number of hens they kept, putting three hens into what had been a single-bird cage or converting their floor-confinement houses from a single deck of roosts to triple-decker roosts. Not long after this, prices fell still further and large numbers of egg farmers left the business. This marked the beginning of the transition from family farms to larger, vertically integrated operations.

This fall in profitability was accompanied by a general fall in prices to the consumer, allowing poultry and eggs to lose their status as luxury foods.

The vertical integration of the egg and poultry industries was a late development, occurring after all the major technological changes had been in place for years (including the development of modern broiler rearing techniques, the adoption of the Cornish Cross broiler, the use of laying cages, etc.).

By the late 1950s, poultry production had changed dramatically. Large farms and packing plants could grow birds by the tens of thousands, radically impacting labor practices alongside farming techniques.[19] Chickens could be sent to slaughterhouses for butchering and processing into prepackaged commercial products to be frozen or shipped fresh to markets or wholesalers. Meat-type chickens currently grow to market weight in six to seven weeks whereas only fifty years ago it took three times as long.[20] This is due to genetic selection and nutritional modifications and not the use of growth hormones, which are illegal for use in poultry in the US and many other countries. Once a meat consumed only occasionally, the common availability and lower cost has made chicken a common meat product within developed nations. Growing concerns over the cholesterol content of red meat in the 1980s and 1990s further resulted in increased consumption of chicken.

Between 2007 and 2010 a total of about 90 billion eggs were produced per year.[27][28]

In 2008, 9.08 billion chickens were slaughtered in the United States according to United States Department of Agriculture data.[29]

According to ProPublica, the food safety system for poultry in the United States is "ill-equipped to protect consumers or rebuff industry influence." The U.S. poultry industry is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has been characterized as toothless and beholden to business interests. The USDA does not stop companies from selling poultry contaminated with dangerous strains of salmonella, does not have the power to suspend operations in contaminated plants, and does not have power to order recalls. As a consequence, salmonella outbreaks are frequent in the U.S. whereas they have dramatically reduced in comparable European countries over time.[54]

In the United States it is common practice for chicken carcasses to be washed with antimicrobial rinses in order to remove harmful bacteria.[55]

These rinses, containing chlorine dioxide solution, acidified sodium chlorite, trisodium phosphate or peroxyacids, are often referred to as Pathogen Reduction Treatments. The process is said to reduce the prevalence of salmonella from 14% to 2%. Since 1997, the European Union has refused to permit the import of chicken treated in this way, claiming that it compensates for poor hygiene behaviour elsewhere in the supply chain and disincentivises the poultry industry to put in place proper hygiene practices. American negotiators say this is just protectionism.[56] It is claimed by opponents of Brexit that this shows how British food safety standards would drop. UK International Trade Secretary Liam Fox was said to have suggested that this might be part of a bilateral free trade agreement and was subsequently challenged to eat a chlorine-washed chicken live on camera.[57] Steve Baker, formerly a Minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union, said in October 2018 that chlorine-washed chicken was just "clean chicken."[58]

The use of human antibiotics in meat chickens created antibiotic resistance that has spread to human pathogens and been documented in outbreaks.