Farming Without Farmers: Deskilling in Contract Broiler Farming
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Date
2019-01-11
Authors
Miller, Elizabeth
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Social scientists and food studies scholars have shown an enduring interest in how
food is produced in our largely industrialized food system. However, there has been little
research about the organization of labor on industrialized farms. These sites of production
are mostly privately owned and hidden away from researchers and journalists, who are
often perceived as critics or activists by farmers and other agriculturalists. My
dissertation fills this gap by focusing exclusively on industrialized contract broiler farms.
Contract broiler farming is a model where farmers agree to raise chickens for meat for a
set amount of time, at a rate of pay based on the ratio of feed to chicken weight at
slaughter. Farmers invest in the built infrastructure to execute this process, but the
company they contract for is mostly in control of the upstream and downstream supply
and processing chains that depend on the production of the broiler chicken for their
continued functioning.
I use archival, interview, and ethnographic data to detail the history of broiler
farming, the emergence of contracting, and what the experience of it is like today. The
most significant and novel part of this project is my ethnographic data collected over six
months spent working on two broiler farms contracted with one of the largest firms in the
US. To date, no other researchers have been able to gain this level of access.
In this dissertation, I begin by exploring the role of management, detailing how the
structure of the farming contract and ambiguous supervisory oversight facilitates farmer’s
compliance with company demands. Then, utilizing agricultural and labor scholarship on
deskilling in the labor process, I explore how poultry farming has become deskilled,
robbing farmers of autonomy, the opportunity to agitate for better labor conditions, and
ultimately eroding the intimate knowledge necessary to execute successful animal
husbandry. Finally, I explore the games farmers play at work. While these games obscure
how surplus value is appropriated from the farmer by the contracting firm, they also
demonstrate farmer’s resistance and acquiescence to their deskilling and loss of
autonomy.
Description
Keywords
Agrarian studies, Agricultural deskilling, Broiler chicken, Contract farming, Industrial agriculture, Labor process