Maryn McKenna

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The Poultry Industry Responds to an Activist Farmer

February 23, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Farmer Craig Watts.

Farmer Craig Watts. RANDALL HILL/Reuters/Corbis

Last week I broke the story that contract chicken farmer Craig Watts, who had let animal-welfare activists film in the barns where he raises poultry for Perdue Farms, filed for whistleblower protection against the company because he felt retaliated against. In his complaint — made to the Department of Labor under the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act — Watts said that the condition of the chicks Perdue delivered to him compelled him to raise “adulterated or misbranded food” for consumers, and that when he attempted to reveal this, the company harassed him with inspectors’ visits.

When I posted on Watts’ complaint, which has the form of a lawsuit though it is filed with a federal agency not a court, I said I’d update once I got reaction from the company or the industry. I’ve received their reactions now and, since it’s been a few days, it seems more fair to break them out in a separate post, rather than adding to last week’s.

Short version, with details below: Perdue and the National Chicken Council both say that Watts — who has not lost his contract with the company — is not being retaliated against, but needs guidance to do a better job raising the chickens he is sent.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry, whistleblower

A Factory Farmer Strikes Back at the Company He Farms For

February 19, 2015 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Farmer Craig Watts. original: video by Compassion in World Farming

Farmer Craig Watts. Screenshot: video by Compassion in World Farming

Back in December I wrote about a chicken farmer who took the extraordinary step of inviting animal-welfare activists into his barns to document the conditions under which his contract compels him to raise his birds. The farmer, Craig Watts of North Carolina, has raised chicken for Perdue Farms for two decades and has often been a top producer for them; he was not an outlier, but someone well within the corporate farming system. Yet it weighed on his conscience that even when he did his best to care for them, the birds seemed deformed and unwell. “The consumer’s being hoodwinked,” he said at the time.

The video he made with the group Compassion in World Farming has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. Watts continues to raise chickens for Perdue; the company did not yank his contract. But he claims he has been subjected to a campaign of retaliation from Perdue as a result, with very frequent visits from a variety of inspectors, and so he has taken a second extraordinary step. He has filed a federal complaint claiming whistleblower protection, alleging that he was forced to violate laws that protect consumers against “adulterated or misbranded” food.

Watts was not the first chicken contract farmer to speak out — Carole Morrison, a Maryland contract farmer, appeared in the documentary Food, Inc. and lost her livelihood as a result — but he’s almost certainly the first to strike back.

Watts is being represented by the Food Integrity Campaign, part of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which filed on his behalf this morning with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, within the US Department of Labor. The complaint and cover letter are on the nonprofit’s site. The cover letter sums up the issue (“Complainant” is Watts and “Respondent” is Perdue):

Complainant has observed an increase in the number of chicks placed on his farm carrying bacterial infections. As a result, Complainant believes that Respondent has not adequately controlled sanitation in its hatcheries to prevent birds from developing infections while at the hatchery, and is not culling sick birds from flocks at the hatchery with sufficient care to prevent the introduction and spread of diseases among the flocks placed on his farm. Additionally, Complainant believes that because Respondent crowds too many birds into each house, the birds do not have adequate room to move around freely, causing them trample each other to access water and food, which in turn leads to scratches and increased risk of infection. Moreover, Respondent prohibits Complainant from administering antibiotics and other medications to sick birds, and Respondent has refused to administer drugs to the birds when Complainant has sought help dealing with apparent outbreaks of disease among flocks placed on his farm.

Watts and his attorneys claim protection under the recent Food Safety Modernization Act, which added whistleblower “employee protection” provisions to the thicket of laws that govern food safety in the United States.

It’s notable that, in the complaint, Watts doesn’t ask for much: He doesn’t seek punitive damages, for instance, just attorneys’ fees and legal costs. Mostly what he asks is to continue to farm. After he went public,  the poultry industry responded that the conditions in the video were the result of his poor farming practices; Watts says the first inspectors’ visits were within hours of the video going live, and continued “almost daily” since then, 23 times in the past two months. According to him, he was put on a  “performance improvement plan,” and the complaint asks for that to be reversed, and for an end to any “retaliatory increased inspections.”

This is a lot of legalese, but the key facts are these: Most of the meat we eat in the US is raised in conditions that most consumers cannot see. This farmer felt those conditions were injurious to animals and bad for eaters. He opened the doors on his small corner of the industry in the hopes of changing it, and he wants to keep those doors open. Whistleblower protection might help him do that. I reached Watts quickly by phone, and he said: “I want there to be some avenue for farmers to be protected, so that they don’t have to be walking around on eggshells. Hopefully this is it.”

Because the complaint was just posted, Perdue has not yet commented, but I will ask them for comment and update this post when they do.

Here’s the original video in which Watts appeared:

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry, whistleblower

Hoping to Change the Industry, a Factory Farmer Opens His Barn Doors

December 4, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This post has been updated; read to the end.)

A few months ago, reporting on farm antibiotic use, I met a North Carolina farmer named Craig Watts. Craig lives in a small town near the South Carolina line where his forebears have been since the Carolinas were a British colony, and for more than 20 years, he has raised broiler chickens for Perdue Farms.

Watts went into chicken farming because, where he lives, there were not many alternatives. His parents and relatives had been row-crop farmers, but after the tobacco economy began to collapse, that looked like not a great way to make a living. Out of college, he began working as a field technician for an agricultural-chemicals company, but he disliked cubicle life and wanted to get back outside. When an advance man for Perdue came calling, showing spreadsheets of how lucrative chicken farming might be, he decided to give it a try.

It worked for him at first; he said that he was, intermittently, a top earner in the slaughterhouse complex that buys his chickens. But over the years, he chafed at the economic conditions the vertically integrated business imposed on farmers, who always seemed to get the raw end of the deal, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable with what intensive farming did to the chickens themselves. He began speaking out: first writing op-eds, then testifying at a government hearing exploring unfair contract conditions, and then talking to advocates and journalists.

And now he has taken his boldest step yet — really an extraordinary one, given the closed-door nature of most corporate farming: He has made a video, in cooperation with the animal-welfare group Compassion in World Farming, in which he escorts cameras into his broiler barns.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, poultry

Chicken Company Perdue Takes Big Steps to Reduce Antibiotic Use

September 3, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Karen Jackson (CC), Flickr

Karen Jackson (CC), Flickr

Big news in the world of food policy, farming and antibiotic use: Perdue Farms, the third-largest chicken producer in the United States, announced today that during the past decade it has ceased using most of the antibiotics that formerly propped up its chicken production.

There are caveats to that “most,” and I’ll explain them. But it’s important to say up front that this is a nationally significant move and looks like an industry-leading step.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, food policy, food safety, poultry, Resistance

H7N9 Flu, Year Two: What Is Going On?

February 10, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Live-poultry market, Shandong, China, 2009. Jonas_in-China (CC), Flickr

Live-poultry market, Shandong, China, 2009. Jonas_in-China, Flickr

Cast your mind back to about this time a year ago. A novel strain of flu, influenza A (H7N9), had emerged in China, in the provinces around Shanghai. International health authorities were deeply concerned, because any new strain of flu bears careful watching — and also because, on the 10th anniversary of the SARS epidemic, no one knew how candid China would be about its cases.

By the time peak season for flu ended in China, there had been 132 cases and 37 deaths from that newest flu strain. But, confounding expectations, the Chinese government was notably open about the new disease’s occurrence, and scientists worldwide were able to ramp up to study it. Still, no one could say whether that flu would be the one to make the always-feared leap to a pandemic strain that might sweep the globe. As with other, earlier, worrisome strains of flu, science could only wait and see whether it might return.

And now it has.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: avian flu, CDC, chicken, China, flu, H5N1, H7N9, influenza, poultry, Science Blogs, Who

Drug-Resistant Bacteria on Chicken: It's Everywhere and the Government Can't Help

December 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Thousand Robots (CC), Flickr

Two important, linked publications are out today, both carrying the same message: The way we raise poultry in this country is creating an under-appreciated health hazard, and the government structures we depend upon to detect that hazard and protect us from it are failing us.

The two pubs are:

  • A long piece that will be in the Feb. 2014 edition of Consumer Reports but has been placed online today.
  • A companion report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, addressing some of the systemic problems raised by the Consumer Reports story.

Short version: Independent tests show that multi-drug resistant disease-causing bacteria are widely present on chicken, and the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has insufficient personnel, or legal authority, to change that.

Both these assertions are important, because foodborne illness, and especially drug-resistant foodborne illness, are also under-appreciated — for how serious the disease can be, and how long-lasting the after-effects are. (For more on those: Here’s a piece I wrote for The Atlantic about how drug-resistant bacteria on chicken are causing an epidemic of urinary tract infections, and one for Scientific American about the lifelong cost of foodborne illness.)

It’s worth emphasizing also that we are right now in the middle of an outbreak of Salmonella on chicken that has been going on for about a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted an update just this morning: 416 people since since last February, in 23 states and Puerto Rico, 39 percent of them hospitalized, linked to a single producer’s brand of chicken.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, chicken, food, food policy, food safety, NARMS, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

USDA: Chicken Processed in China Can be Sold in the US Without Labels to Say So

September 4, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

source: nugget photo and poor Photoshop skills by me.

Catching up to this news, which dropped quietly just before the holiday weekend: In a first, the US Department of Agriculture has given permission for chicken products processed in the People’s Republic of China to be sold in the United States without labeling that would indicate where the chicken products came from.

The news was broken by Politico, whose writers obtained USDA documents before the agency released them, and then followed up by the New York Times, with some no-holds-barred analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know that food safety in China is well below US standards. (See this post for stories of toxic vinegar, glow-in-the-dark pork, and more.) So it may be a surprise to hear that birds grown and slaughtered outside that country, but cooked and made into products in it, would be acceptable for sale here. Especially since the plants that USDA has approved for sales into the US market will not have USDA inspectors on site.

Here is the USDA notice, in the form of an audit issued by the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: chicken, China, FDA, FSIS, poultry, Science Blogs, USDA

Antibiotic Use in Chickens: Responsible for Hundreds of Human Deaths?

August 9, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Flickr: Thousand Robots, CC

In the long back and forth between science and agriculture over the source of antibiotic resistance in humans — Due to antibiotic overuse on farms, or in human medicine? — one question has been stubbornly hard to answer. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria do arise on farms, do they leave the farm and circulate in the wider world? And if they do, how much damage do they do?

A multi-national team of researchers recently published their answers to both questions. Their answer: In Europe, 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, cephalosporins, E. coli, food, food policy, food safety, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

The Cool Factor (With Feathers): New York Chefs React To Pastured Poultry

June 11, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: OZinOH/Flickr

If you’ve been around here a while, you might remember a couple of posts about the pastured-poultry movement. Pastured poultry is new old-style: beyond cage-free, beyond free-range, it puts chickens out on grass for most of their lives, producing a bird that lives longer, looks healthier, and tastes distinctly different from standard supermarket chicken. (“They have huge, old-fashioned taste,” Shaun Doty, a chef who has been working with them, told me last year. “They cook differently, and they eat differently.”

Pastured poultry represents a radically different way of raising chicken than the standard large-intensive model: no antibiotic use, no crammed chicken houses, no genetic-monoculture birds with their inevitable physical vulnerabilities. So far, it’s a niche in the market: The number of producers is small, the birds are more expensive — and even though the chickens taste like what our grandparents would have eaten, most of us have never known chicken tasted like that, so they can be a challenge to sell. The first problem, though, is raising awareness that the alternative exists at all.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, chicken, poultry, Science Blogs

How Do You Know Which Chicken to Buy? This Kickstarter Might Help.

May 31, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

 

There’s a project I’ve been watching on Kickstarter and I’m a little surprised it hasn’t gotten more traction, so I thought I’d call it out. TL;DR: You know those wallet cards and apps that help you make good choices about buying seafood: what’s endangered, what’s overfished, what’s responsible to eat? This effort, BuyingPoultry.com, hopes to do the same for chicken — but it’s only halfway to its goal.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, chicken, Kickstarter, NARMS, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

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