After reading Christopher Leonard's The Meat Racket, a broadside against the contract-farming system, I decided to take a closer look at it.
I drove to North Carolina and ended up in the kind of place that supplies practically all of our chickens: A metal-sided, 500-foot-long structure near the town of Fairmont.
In the dim light, I see 30,000 little chicks scuttling around on the floor. "They're 12 days old," explains Craig Watts, who's growing these birds for Perdue Farms.
Perdue owns the chickens. It also supplies the feed that they eat. About a month from now, when the birds have grown to about 4.5 pounds, the company will send a truck to carry them away, and Watts will get paid. But he never knows how big his check will be.
"It's like that test you took in school — you kind of want to know how you did, but you really don't? It's that kind of feeling," he says.
The uncertainty is part of a peculiar payment system that the chicken industry uses. It's often called a tournament. Critics say it's more like a lottery.
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