Now this kind of assimilation makes for a very efficient, bounce-a-quarter-off-it type of system.
By 1955, nearly 90 percent of the broiler industry was run on contract production, and at the time it seemed a decent venture. There were a number of processors, allowing farmers to shop around for the best contract handshake deals back then.
It’s changed considerably. Now broiler contract production seems about as advisable as a payday loan, given the expensive technology needed to be competitive and the fact that four big companies—Tyson, Pilgrim’s, Perdue, and Koch—dominate the market share.
And the way the modern system is now structured, the industry really has the chicken farmer by the short feathers.
Let’s do a quick walk-through, hitting only the highlights. Handshake deals are now history, replaced with ironclad contracts. The grower must build a barn to the integrators’ specifications. Fine. Say a farm family invests some three hundred thousand dollars in a building with a loan over fifteen years. And while many growers sign long-term contracts, few get any guarantee of how many flocks they’ll get annually. The birds are owned by the integrator (as are the feed and antibiotics), and these chickens are in and out of their barn in under fifty days. The only thing the farmer has legal possession of is the loan debt and the chicken shit. And I’m not even making that up.
Contractually, growers are left to figure out what to do with tons of manure, and since they’re not growing any grain for the hens under their care (low-price feed is trucked in by the integrator), they have little agricultural use for it. Many growers don’t have fields, only enough land to build the warehouse. And with multiple growers located near the processing plant, there’s more waste than the region can handle. Improper management of this broiler litter has led to polluted waterways and federal cleanups.
Everything, even the tourney system that pits growers against each other to determine how much they’re paid, is slanted against the grower, but that isn’t even the worst part. Big Chicken, at any time, can demand expensive upgrades to the facilities, which the farmer pays for—or the integrator might withhold birds. If there’s complaining, well, a grower might wait a very long time between flocks or get terminated altogether. And what of their barn payment then? There’s more than one documented case where farmers have broken the cycle of servitude by suicide.
“Jason, you need to encourage them to license, steer them away from contract production,” I barked into the phone. At this point dinner prep had come to a standstill. “For one thing, they’ll be less beholden to us, plus they won’t miss out on all the fun marketing parts.”
“Well, Amish farmers might have a different definition of fun, Lu.”
“Amish?” I said, bewildered. “But I thought you said their farm is modern.”
While we were still dragging fences across uneven fields and gathering eggs on our knees, an Amish farmer who freely rejects the modernity of zippers had us grossly outmechanized.
Well, don’t that sting.
And at that moment, just as Locally Laid considered the responsibilities of contract production, another proposal was on the table.
I’d been out biking with Milo when his chain fell off. While attempting to wrestle the greasy thing back on, a couple approached. The gentleman, athletic and a bit older than me, helped me feed the chain back in place. He held out his now-dirty hand and introduced himself as Philip. After some friendly chitchat, in which he learned I was “the Locally Laid lady,” he indicated he was a businessman in industrial manufacturing and an investor. It just so happened he was looking to add a new business to his portfolio.
Jason was eventually brought in and we started a conversation that went on for a few weeks, just as we were moving forward with a partnership with the Amish farmers. After learning our business model of sourcing and selling locally, Philip concluded that we should avoid contract production and build a much bigger farm here in the Northland. He envisioned scaling up to three huge barns with eight thousand chickens each—and a generous salary for Jason and me.
“This doesn’t feel like Middle Ag,” I said to Jason as he tied his work boots, getting ready to leave for the farm. “How can we sell that many eggs within our region?”
“What he’s proposing, Bird, is really more of a factory model,” said Jason. “I’m not even sure with a flock that size we could actually get all the birds outside.”
He rubbed his face and sighed. “But I don’t want to live through another winter like last year, either.”
We tussled with the offer, wondering if there was a way to accommodate a bird’s natural instincts to roost and dust-bathe and forage outdoors in these kind of numbers. And I’ll admit it: the salary, and the financial relief it would bring, tempted us.
But just as we’d come to the difficult decision not to accept the offer, Philip called and abruptly withdrew it. No hard feelings. Obviously, it was for the best, but still it was like rejection from a lover—even one you were about to dump.
This left the partner farm option. And after rejecting a scale-based growth model, contract production seemed like a better way for Locally Laid to bring enough money to keep our farm going, satisfy the demand for our pasture-raised product, and grow beyond the reach of our northern farm.
That is, if I could become comfortable with the model.
Jason and I engaged in a conversational dance around the ethics of contract production. I would bring up some fresh area of freak-out and Jason would calmly lay out why we would not morph into immoral money fiends, harnessing fellow farmers as minions.
But in my ear I could still hear the respected keynote speaker at MOSES warning about small, sustainable operations like ours getting too big, too commercial, too corporate.
“Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing, Jason? Are we going to be like some evil egg-pire stamping LoLas across the countryside?”
He sighed a little. I’d probably asked some variation of this question at least a dozen times recently. He spoke slowly and all but donned a sock puppet in his effort to convey his message.
“LuBird, no. You’re confusing us with McDonald’s. We’re not like that because those kinds of franchises truck their McFood product all around the country. This Amish family will be buying feed in their area, encouraging a crop farmer to plant more non-GMO corn—in their area. They’ll buy farm implements from an area dealer and they’re going to be making more money than they did keeping their birds inside for cage-free eggs—and where are they going to spend that money, Lu?”
“In their area?” I sheepishly offered.
“And,” he said to close his argument, “we’re the ones taking all the risk. We still have to find locations for these eggs.”
The truth of it squeezed my stomach. This contract meant Jason would have to sell eggs in the big Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area, a place where we’d had only a little media play or industry connections. Sure, we were in one co-op there now, but suddenly there were a lot more pasture-raised eggs to unload.
Jason put his arms around me. He was too kind to say it, but we both know that I am not a visionary.
“This way we can meet egg demand and get farmers farming,” he said. “We’re doing the right thing for Locally Laid and everyone involved. It’s all coming together, Bird …”
I smiled wryly.
“This could be an opportunity to redefine contract production,” Jason went on. “You know, make it not suck.”
I decided that given that nine out of ten farm households in the United States require some infusion of off-farm cash, this sourcing and selling of good eggs might as well be ours. After all, Jason had spent months figuring out how to create a market for our different kind of product and the complex transportation system to get our eggs into shoppers’ hands. Why shouldn’t he have a side job doing that work for others?
I sighed, leaning into him. “I’m always just asking, ‘What would LoLa do?’ I don’t want to let her down. She’s, you know, like a f
riend of mine.”
It’s true, despite how utterly diagnosable that sounds. Through LoLa, my sassy and sustainable logo hen, I was able to write more tenaciously about eating local, animal welfare, and the treatment of the planet than I ever could have without her. More than anything, I could feel, building through her, a desire to be the spokeschicken for Middle Ag. And while contract production seemed difficult and scary, it also sounded like agriculture of the middle.
We signed a contract.
Before those birds came into lay, Jason set about finding homes for these future eggs. We got help in the strangest of places. My friend Eric had been wearing our farm’s Local Chicks Are Better tee when an acquaintance took a liking to it. It was through a friend of that new shirt admirer that Jason was now sitting in a room with the dairy-buying executive team of one of the Twin Cities area’s biggest grocery store chains.
This was not the type of operation that had a back door accessible to winsome farmers. Jason had been trying to get in touch with these buyers for weeks, but not until a peer contacted a decision maker directly was Locally Laid granted an audience.
It felt that reverent.
Just mentioning the meeting with this grocery corporation made friends swoon. They made us feel like our financial struggles would soon be behind us.
Jason knew this wasn’t going to be easy. The feeling in the room, as he described it, was “combative and extractive.”
“What do you mean by that?” I’d asked him when he came home, dazed.
“They made it really clear that they’re the Big Dance and just talking to us was an enormous favor.”
In return for a little shelf space, the chain of stores wanted concessions. Big ones. They were insistent that our prices be higher than we’d prefer. After some go-rounds, it became clear this price hike was not to benefit Locally Laid, but to take us out of competition with their house brand.
But, they’d said, raising our price would also help offset the mandatory discount. What I didn’t know is that when an item goes on sale, the store retains its full margin on the product (in this case, 25 percent) while the producer gets flogged by the sale deduction. Also, we were expected to roll out paid ads to support our brand—and these ads were to mention that our eggs were available at the particular chain.
Of all the policies, what was most difficult was their remittance system. Unlike most of our vendors, this big corp was only going to pay after thirty days. To a small operation like ours, cash is critical. It’s all about the flow. We had myriad expenses and were often left playing it close to the edge, driving checks directly from the mailbox to the bank. And we didn’t much like the thought of scratching to keep our farm and feed partners paid while this industry behemoth made interest on our money (little as that was).
After a couple of hours, Jason emerged from the room feeling both educated and beat up, but with a handshake deal to start with a few stores. He followed up the next day with an e-mail and then, a week later, a second. They never responded. Nor did they return calls.
Sometimes business just goes that way.
And though it took weeks of traveling back and forth to the metro, Jason found homes in smaller stores for all those future cartons. Of course, things would fluctuate and there’d be sweaty weeks when we wrote checks to our partner farms for eggs we couldn’t sell (sending them off to food shelves). But despite a few hiccups, it was slowly starting to work.
We were officially farmer integrators, on a quest to redefine the term for the better.
Chapter 18
Jason carried disappointment like feed buckets, his shoulders stooped under its weight. After the bulk of the morning chores were done, he’d left Brian at the farm. He had an appointment in the glassy downtown offices of the university’s Economic Development Center. Wearing his biohazard of a frayed ball cap, Jason arrived to talk through another rewrite of our loan application. There’d been no bites to fund the new farm, a place where we could build or retrofit a structure for chickens to enjoy semimodern feeders and waterers that wouldn’t freeze, while also having big doors with pasture access. Loan officers, it seemed, were leery of planting modern money into our cutting-edge retro agriculture.
And though we were deep into the lush heat of summer, Jason lived in the shadow of winter coming. The prospect of another cold season, exposed on the prairie, terrorized us. Neither Jason’s nor Brian’s body could take it.
But as he’d been getting up to leave the meeting, our university-provided business coach, Curt, indicated he had one more thing. Turning his computer monitor to face Jason, he said, “You might do well with this.”
It was a small business competition put on by Intuit, the makers of our accounting software. And the prize was a standout: a commercial aired during the Super Bowl. While winning wasn’t likely, Curt pointed out that entrants received a free trial of the online accounting software. This was a motivator.
I’d remembered seeing the contest announcement floating around Facebook and had meant to enter. But now that I was working a nearly full-time job and busily typing out my graduate thesis, I hadn’t followed through.
In reality, I’d forgotten about it.
I looked it over the next day during my regular Locally Laid office hours. These began well before the sun or even the chickens were up, but I needed this time to work and write before heading to Glensheen. Scanning the rules, I saw that all I had to provide was a short paragraph about our business story and a photo.
“I can do that,” I said to myself, and after writing and rewriting the blurb down to the short little nub the character count allowed, I threw it on the contest site with our logo. It couldn’t hurt.
“Maybe it’ll get us more exposure and that’ll help our loan prospects,” I called out from my indented writing spot on the couch where I worked my laptop. Jason crouched over the dining room table and made a disparaging noise. “We needed that farm loan to happen yesterday,” he said, eyes never leaving the invoice he was writing. Seasonal worry hung over him like a cartoon snowstorm.
A few weeks later, we received a mass e-mail saying that we’d made the cut to the next round, us and fifteen thousand other businesses. Now we needed four essays and an introduction video to continue on in this four-round voting contest. We were now competing for clicks.
“We’ve been talking about making a video forever,” I’d said.
“Yeah, okay.” Jason was distracted by his own writing project, a livestock grant. “See if Beau wants to do it.”
I’d already started work on a quick script for my former ad agency colleague. He was now making a go of it as a freelance videographer, and though he was headed to a conference in Minneapolis, Beau graciously agreed to stop at the farm on his way out of town. He and Jason shot the piece in just a couple of hours, which Beau edited overnight, in lieu of sleeping. And having recently taught himself banjo, he set the farm footage over his own upbeat soundtrack.
The next day, with my laptop illuminating the morning dark, I smiled at the screen, then laughed and immediately hit play again. The farm was in its summer glory and Jason earnestly performed my script, even introducing himself as Locally Laid’s Head Clucker. I’d thought for sure he’d balk at that. Somehow the quick video captured all the reasons why we chose to work so damn hard while still being fun and cheerful. At one point, as Jason voiced that our outside birds were “poultry athletes,” Beau brought a sprinting chicken into a hilarious slow-mo. It both squeezed my heart and delighted my funny bone. And Jason spoke with such sincerity in the clip, I even forgave him for wearing the damn hat.
As the contest required online votes, Matt, our designer, got busy creating whimsical, downloadable posters with the tagline This Chick Is a Game-Changing Fowl and stickers to slap on every egg carton going out the egg-packing room door. I started mentioning the contest daily on social media and leveraged the buzz into a few TV and newspaper stories, always good for business and a great opportunity to introduce the concept of m
idlevel producers and our strange world of Middle Ag.
“Lu,” Jason said a few days later, “type the contest site into Google. What do you get?”
Intuit never divulged vote counts, but my search engine results showed our Locally Laid contest page indexing as the third-most-viewed contestant on their website.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “We’ve tainted the results by visiting the page too often. I’ll check it out later.”
After a Saturday morning of errands, I kicked my windshield wipers on high against the rainy fall weather and drove to Duluth’s Canal Park. It’s one of the best viewing spots for freighters on Lake Superior, which makes it the perfect location for a bank of hotels. Pulling into a parking lot, I ran through the storm to hover at the lobby’s guest computer. Water dripped into my shoes as I smiled apologetically to the woman currently using the terminal.
When the PC opened up, I slid into the chair and punched the contest name into the search engine. Here, on this completely unbiased machine, Google showed Locally Laid as the second business listed on the site.
“Holy shit!” I said louder than I intended, causing a flutter of newspapers and the uncrossing and recrossing of legs across the lobby. A kick of excitement flared in my chest. Did that mean we were one of the most-viewed links on the site? People were voting for us? This couldn’t be right. There were thousands of other small businesses competing, many established for years. We’d sold our first egg only thirteen months ago. But this search showed us directly behind NORML, a huge organization over forty years strong, striving to legalize marijuana. They’re huge. One hundred eighty-six thousand people follow their Twitter page, while we were barely breaking two hundred.
Clumsily, I fished my phone out of a pocket and snapped a grainy shot of the screen. Texting it to Jason, I wrote, LoLa’s almost as popular as pot!
That was when we really started feeling a buzz.
Soon I couldn’t go buy a gallon of milk without three people stopping me to tell me they were voting LoLa. I’d stand there uncomfortably as I secretly stashed some other egg brand under giant packages of toilet paper in my shopping cart—Locally Laid eggs were constantly out of stock, and Jason never wanted to bring any home from the farm that could be sold. And since I wasn’t in the washing room much as I worked full-time off farm, the uglies went home with the crew.
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