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Leah Garcés, a lifelong animal-rights activist, wanted to end factory farming. Craig Watts was raising 700,000 chickens for Perdue Farms, one of the largest poultry processors in the United States. Improbably, they joined forces a decade ago, aiming to fix the worst practices of animal agriculture.
Their unlikely collaboration has been celebrated in Garcés’s TED Talk, which has been viewed 1.8 million times; in her book, Grilled: Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry; by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and HBO comedian John Oliver; and in this year’s Netflix documentary, You Are What You Eat. It helped drive reforms at Perdue Farms and spawned the Transfarmation Project, a nonprofit that helps farmers who want to give up raising animals and instead grow crops for people to eat.
So can we characterize their effort to find common ground as an unqualified success? For Garcés and Watts, it seems so, as their unlikely alliance broke the frustrating stalemate each faced. For the chickens, not yet.
Instead, their story shows that there are limits to collaboration, even when adversaries share the best of intentions and a common goal.
It must be said that Garcés and Watts have tackled a massive problem. Broiler chickens, which are chickens raised for meat, make up more than 90 percent of the animals grown for food in the United States. More than 9 billion are raised and killed each year, according to the National Chicken Council, a trade group. The industry says they are “treated with respect and properly cared for,” but critics say they live in filthy, overcrowded conditions and are bred to grow so fast that many struggle to stand or walk without pain.
We’d been told we should hate each other. Somehow we broke free from our bubbles.
Garcés, 46, has cared about animals since growing up in swampy central Florida, where ducks laid eggs in her backyard. After earning a bachelor’s in zoology and a master’s in the environment and development, she worked as an animal-rights organizer in Europe, leading hard-hitting campaigns against retailers and brands. She opened the U.S. office of the advocacy group Compassion in World Farming and is now president of Mercy for Animals, which targets factory farming; it spent about $25 million last year and has about 100 employees.
Watts, 58, was raised on a farm in Fairmont, N.C., where his family had grown tobacco since the 1700s. He got into the chicken business in 1992, signed a contract with Perdue, and borrowed the money to build four chicken barns. Decades later, still in debt, he struggled to earn a living and overcome discomfort about the welfare of his chickens. “I truly believe how you treat your animals reveals your true character,” he once said. Watts shared his misgivings with a Reuters reporter, who connected him to Garcés.
Before meeting, the two spoke on the phone, texted, and emailed, feeling each other out, the animal-rights activist and the factory farmer who was her sworn enemy. “We’d been told we should hate each other,” Watts said in the Netflix documentary. But they talked about their kids, who were about the same age. “It was enough for us to build some trust,” Garcés says. “Somehow we broke free from our bubbles.”
Garcés listened as Watts described contract farming’s inequities. Big processors like Perdue and Tyson Foods provide the chickens, the feed, and veterinary care and set strict standards for growers. Many, like Watts, can’t make ends meet. He reached a breaking point when Perdue began marketing its chickens as “humanely raised.”
“My whole life I had spent blaming him, hating him,” Garcés said in her TED Talk. “I never thought, he feels as trapped as the chickens.”
Together they produced videos of his chickens and their abject conditions. More than a million people saw the videos, among them the Times’s Kristof, whose subsequent column was headlined “Abusing Chickens We Eat.” At first, Perdue Farms blamed Watts, calling him negligent. But the company eventually invited Garcés and other activists to tour its facilities and talk about the welfare of chickens.
Garcés got to know Jim Perdue, the company’s chairman. They exchanged warm emails, and he promised that Perdue Farms would do its best to improve its animal care practices. In 2017, the company took a big step forward: It became the first major poultry producer to sign the Better Chicken Commitment, a pledge to follow standards for broiler welfare developed by advocates.
Perdue Farms now reports annually on its practices. It says that 26 percent of its chickens have access to the outdoors, that 36 percent can take advantage of “enrichments” such as bales of hay or perches, and that 55 percent live in barns with windows. Fifteen years ago, none of its chickens enjoyed those enhancements.
The company had business reasons for making changes. “The best flavor and the best nutrition” come from chickens raised with better welfare practices, says Bruce Stewart-Brown, a Perdue senior vice president.
The most significant thing that can be done is to change the breed. The use of Frankenchicken breeds must stop.
“They are the front runners,” Garcés says, but the rest of the industry has been slow to follow. Breeding remains the major sticking point. Modern, fast-growing chickens are twice as big as those raised in the 1970s and four times as big as those raised in the 1950s. No processor, including Perdue, has agreed to switch to the slower-growing breeds of chickens that suffer less but cost more to raise.
“The most significant thing that can be done is to change the breed,” Garcés says. “The use of Frankenchicken breeds must stop.”
To improve the well-being of broiler chickens, the animal-rights movement is following a playbook that has worked to help egg-laying hens once confined to small cages. Activists persuaded and pressured brands, retailers, restaurants, and food-service companies to sell only cage-free eggs, forcing the big poultry companies to respond. As a result, nearly 40 percent of American hens are cage-free, up from just 6 percent a decade ago.
Still, there’s no simple way to reduce the issues facing broiler chickens into a term like cage-free.
“It’s harder to communicate in a snappy bite,” says Vicky Bond, president of the Humane League, which runs animal-welfare campaigns against corporations. “We are up against a really hard challenge.”
That said, more than 230 food companies, including Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods Market, have signed onto the Better Chicken Commitment, signaling their desire to buy and sell chickens that meet the higher welfare standards.
But processors like Perdue, which have raised thousands of the slower-growing birds on experimental farms, say they cost a lot more to raise because they live longer and require more labor. They also have a bigger environmental impact because of the water and fertilizer needed to grow their feed.
Charging consumers more for the slower-growing chickens would almost surely depress sales. That would be just fine for the activists. “It would cost way more to eat chicken, and that would change everything.” says Garcés, who wants to see shoppers turn to alternative, plant-based proteins. But Perdue and the other chicken companies want people to eat more chicken, not less. No amount of dialogue will change that.
To continue their work with farmers, Garcés and Mercy for Animals started the Transfarmation Project, a program that helps industrial-scale animal farmers switch to raising plants. It’s a small project for now, offering a dozen or so farmers advice on raising crops, connections to new customers, and research grants. Some grow hemp, and others grow specialty crops such as mushrooms, berries, tomatoes, and lettuces.
Craig Watts has tried growing mushrooms in a barn where his chickens used to struggle. He’s also helping fellow farmers who want to give up raising animals and grow plants instead.
“When we were raising chickens, it was not fun,” Watts says. “This is fun.”
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