Turkey at $1.38 a Pound Sounds Great. Until You Think About What That Means.

Life on a factory turkey farm: not such a bargain. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mercyforanimals/6556759163/in/set-72157628531396063">Mercy For Animals</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In Wisconsin, you can buy a Butterball turkey for $1.38 per pound, reports Nami Moon Farms, on its blog. That’s about $16.50 for a 12-pound bird—a Thanksgiving main course for eight, plus “ample leftovers.” The Nami Moon folks calculate that if they tried to compete with Butterball on price in the their pasture-based turkey system, they’d lose $36.44 per bird—representing a loss of $1,822 for the 50 birds they raise.

Now, a conventional economist would likely conclude from this information that Butterball represents the height of industrial efficiency, while Nami Moon is an anachronism. But the low price  doesn’t just reflect efficiency. It also, as the veteran agriculture reporter Christopher Leonard showed in a Friday Washington Post op-ed, reveals power—specifically, the power to exploit farmers.

“Just four corporations—Cargill, Hormel, Butterball and Farbest Foods—produce more than half of the turkey in the United States, a level of concentration unthinkable just a few decades ago,” Leonard writes. Leonard writes that the Big Turkey operates on the chicken industry’s model. Here’s how it works.

Turkeys graze on organic pastures and live in pens that protect them from predators, direct sun light, and wind at Nick’s Organic Farm in Maryland. USDA/Flickr

Here is what modern poultry farming looks like: A farmer will borrow several hundred thousand dollars (or in some cases millions) to build industrial barns where the birds will be raised. The birds themselves are never bought or sold on an open market; a poultry company delivers chicks to the farm and picks them up about six weeks later when the birds are big enough to slaughter. Farmers are kept on short-term contracts with the big poultry companies and live in fear that they’ll be dropped.

As a result, large processors manage to soak up most of the profits from large-scale turkey production, while “farmers are living on the edge of bankruptcy,” he reports. According to these recent USDA numbers show (Excel file), turkey farmers’ feed costs has risen by a factor of 2.5 since 2000, mainly because of the ethanol boom, while the price they get for their finished birds has risen only by 1.5 times. Meanwhile, Leanard shows, the meat giants’ profit margins have expanded in recent years.

Of course, the power to squeeze farmers isn’t the only advantage Big Turkey holds over small operators like Nami Moon. As I’ve shown before, the meat industry also boasts a formidable ability to prevent regulators from requiring them to clean up their messes. With 15,000 birds in a typical turkey facility—with an average of three flocks per year, that’s a lot of concentrated turkey shit. At these mammoth operations, the welfare of the confined birds is  (sometimes literally) stomped on. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, yet another undercover video revealed horrific abuse on a factory turkey farm.

Then, of course, there are working conditions at the industry’s vast slaughterhouses—staffed by low-wage workers who endure “debilitating pain in their hands, gnarled fingers, chemical burns, and respiratory problems,” as the Southern Poverty Law Center put it in a recent report. Finally, there’s the industry’s reliance on low doses of antibiotics to keep animals alive and growing fast under cramped, unsanitary conditions, which the Centers for Disease Control has bluntly acknowledged contributes to antibiotic-resistant pathogens that threaten people.

So that $1.38/pound price tag doesn’t tell a simple story about industrial efficiency. It’s also the consumer cherry on top of a largely invisible production system built on rank exploitation—of farmers, workers, animals, public health, and land.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate