A Broiler Chicken Revolution
When mechanised slaughter came to Australia
At Open for Animals, we have long been curious to know what it was like to experience first hand the beginning of intensive meat production. What was it like to go from backyard chickens to a life of ubiquitous meat in the shadows of factory farms?
Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) describes this expansion of chicken meat production in the following ways:
If someone were to count up every animal that has lived on earth in the past fifty years and tally the harmful acts done to them, he or she might argue that no progress has been made in the treatment of animals. The reason is that the Animal Rights Revolution has been partly canceled out by another development, the Broiler Chicken Revolution.
In a book with the thesis that violence caused by humans is declining, and that the world statistically is getting better, intensive chicken farming remains a low point. It casts a surprisingly negative light on Enlightenment’s progress.
So much else has made way for the powers of science to make things better in our lives, but the Broiler Chicken Revolution seems to be a case study in how applying science should not work. Unintended consequences and negative effects for sentient lives appear to have created an intractable problem.
The idea of a Broiler Chicken Revolution will likely be somewhat foreign to Australians and readers from outside the United States who are unfamiliar with the concept of a broiler. A broiler chicken is simply any chicken breed raised specifically for meat consumption. Australia and the United States now have billions of these chickens selected only for meat.
Pinker describes describes the transformation of the chicken meat industry since the 1930s in the United States. By breeding broilers for a new mechanised system of slaughter, chicken meat changed from a luxury that families may have had only occasionally, to a meat that is commonly eaten every day and for almost every meal. The Broiler Chicken Revolution opened up the possibility of a limitless horizon of universal fast food convenience.
It is easy to forget that the scale of this change was even more harmful for chickens than it would have been for larger animals simply because, despite all the progress in breeding techniques, it still takes over two hundred chickens to provide the same amount of meat as a single cow.
Pinker explains the growing trend of consuming smaller animals to be the result of a general incuriosity about the lives of chickens:
Now, factory farming and cruel treatment of poultry and livestock go back centuries, so the baneful trend was not a backsliding of moral sensibilities or an increase in callousness. It was a steadily creeping up of the numbers, driven by changes in economics and taste, which had gone undetected because a majority of people had always been incurious about the lives of chickens. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the animals that provide us with the other white meat.
We posted the full, disarming passage from Pinker’s book on our Facebook page in January and received many responses. One response we received caught our eye.
It was from a man named Roman Wozniak: “If you had seen what was going on in the 1960s at Ingham’s, you would not eat chicken ever again. Things might have changed since I worked there.”
Ingham Chickens is an Australian chicken food company that started as a family company. Like Tyson Foods or Cargill’s in the United States, it now dominates the chicken meat market in the Asia-Pacific region.
Here was someone who worked in Australia’s biggest chicken company as an insider at a historically significant moment. We interviewed Roman, and he has agreed to share his insider story of the Chicken Broiler Revolution.
What the Revolution did
To fully appreciate Roman’s story and why, having walked in his shoes, we “would not eat chicken ever again”, we have to understand what the Broiler Chicken Revolution did to chickens and how that impacted humans.
As Pinker describes it, this Revolution was an almost seamless one that may have led to an unprecedented scale of production and may have passed unquestioned as one of the marvels of a modern age. The number of animals slaughtered for meat increased dramatically in the wake of this Revolution. As the variety of chicken food increased in supermarkets and fast food outlets, with freezing and new forms of processing, so did demand which seemed, and still seems, insatiable.
The Broiler Chicken Revolution increased the supply of cheap meat, making meat much more affordable for the everyday person, and it brought new factory jobs. Investors around the world embraced this new highly efficient, assembly-line style of producing chicken meat; it was reminiscent of the revolution in that automobile industry brought about by Henry Ford’s Model T.
Who could argue against the world-wide growth of a new business model that could feed the world cheap meat that a generation ago was an unaffordable luxury? Indeed the Broiler Revolution has not been without its critics.
For starters, the increase in meat consumption may have resulted in adverse health impacts to human beings. With the culmination of the Broiler Chicken Revolution in the 1980s, obesity in the the populace the United States and other OECD countries have skyrocketed in measures such as child obesity or average BMI index. Furthermore, with the rise of factory farming brought about by the Broiler Revolution, the nutritional value of chicken has appeared to decline.
For perhaps its sharpest critics, the Broiler Chicken Revolution was the origin of an unprecedented expansion in animal cruelty. Driven by a technological leap forward, there was nothing ‘natural’ about this new form of farming. Interventions in intensive systems had to integrate millions and in fact billions of animals indoors; technology has yet to find a way to do this while maintaining quality of life for chickens.
With veterinary care, we are able to provide the right conditions, including antibiotics and supplemented feed, to keep chickens alive long enough to grow rapidly and be shipped to the slaughterhouse. Cost efficiency was made possible by a systematic approach to genetically selecting bigger breeds of chickens. Chickens became broilers, designed specifically for meat.
Breeding chickens that grew faster and reached slaughter weight younger than ever before resulted in higher yields for chicken farming and led to a more efficient conversion of grain into chicken meat; but it came at the expense of the welfare of broiler chickens, with increased and painful health problems.
A sharp increase in the number of chickens that could barely stand under their own weight was one of the signs that intensive farming was working to drive costs down. Completely new welfare indicators have had to be created to monitor and improve the brutal conditions of intensive factory farming, such as: rates of the incidence of tibial dyschondroplasia (TD) (a metabolic condition in which the bones of young chickens do not develop), foot pad dermatitis, hock burns, leg disorders, oxygen pressure in the blood and death.
Despite all the advances in intensive farm management, from time to time and in their development there were catastrophic failures in these systems that had to be overcome. Even today, hundreds of millions of chickens do not make it to our plates and literally suffer to death.
When broilers first came to Australia
There are few accounts that reveal to us what it was like to be around when the Broiler Chicken Revolution first arrived, and give us a sense of the gradual emergence of factory farming, the acceptance of a brutal new system.
We are aware of a number of first hand accounts of contemporary broiler farming, such as Open Cage’s horrifying video diary of 6 weeks on a Polish broiler chicken farm. Sensational accounts of intensive farming, which show animals brutalised in awful conditions, do not usually help us understand the unprecedented development of the scale of this farming and the way everyday decisions and technological changes have contributed to it.
In the United States, the Broiler Chicken Revolution emerged in the 1930s. With its farming industries protected from global markets for much of the twentieth century, Australia was slow to catch up to the pace of change in the United States. That began to change at the end of the 1960s, according to the Poultry Hub’s history of the meat chicken (broiler) industry:
The establishment of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Australia, with its first store opening in 1968, had a major impact on the consumption of chicken. In the 12 months from 1970–1971, a total of 75 stores were opened and during the same period total Australian production increased by 38%. Coupled with further improvements in the genetic material available, refinement of the nutrition and husbandry of broiler chickens, improvements in processing technologies and further growth in demand, the industry’s output increased more than five-fold in the 1960s and more than doubled again in the 1970s. It has continued to grow steadily, although less spectacularly, over the past 30 years.
It was only in the 1960s that the Broiler Chicken Revolution can be said to have begun transforming chickens into meat chickens, creating a dinner table staple rather than an occasional luxury that was often a byproduct of the layer industry. The industry went from backyards and layer birds on family farms to mass production and mechanised slaughter.
Ingham dates its own success to the importation of systems from the United States that satisfied fast food and supermarket customers (or major retail and quick service restaurant (QSR) customers) in the 1960s. Thirty years later in the 1990s, and Australians had increased their consumption of chicken to such a degree that their diet reflected the average American person’s diet, as infographed below in terms of its impact on animal lives.
This pattern of consumption also led to Australia becoming the highest per capita consumer of meat in the world in the decades following the 1990s, despite declining beef consumption. During this period, obesity in Australia rose above OECD average.
So what happened when the Broiler Chicken Revolution came to Australia? What was it like to see it happen and watch as it took over?
We knew that Roman Wozniak had an answer, of sorts: “If you had seen what was going on in the 1960s at Ingham’s, you would not eat chicken ever again. Things might have changed since I worked there.”
Roman’s story
We were very curious to interview Roman Wozniak, who claimed that being an insider in the Broiler Chicken Revolution would turn anyone off eating chickens. At last we could begin to address the lack of information about what it was like to be behind the scenes in the emergence of intensive broiler farming in Australia.
Roman Wozniak was born in Germany and his family left the country following the outbreak of WWII. Roman grew up in Ingleburn, a suburb of Sydney in New South Wales. When he left high school in 1963, he worked at Ingham enterprises Ltd as a Junior Storeman.
Roman described his first hand experience of working for the chicken production company. We asked Roman questions and he was generous enough to answer them.
In his role at Ingham Chicken, Roman noticed how the company was able to integrate its business into a kind of monopoly of production and supply. This was characteristic of the successful business models in the United States that followed in the wake of the Rockefellers and other successful corporations:
The chickens were raised in special sheds. Ingham’s lent money to the people to build the sheds and to buy the new born chickens and then would buy them back for so much per pound at around 3 to 5 weeks old.
Roman described his role at Ingham Chickens to us:
I gave out uniforms, stapled boxes of packed chickens, unloaded trucks etc. The working conditions were pretty good and clean considering that there were over 300 people working there. When I started they were processing about 26,000 chickens per day, then later they put on a night shift and upped it to 32,000 thousand. After 12 months, I asked for a raise so they put me outside, unloading trucks, on the spin chiller breaking the breasts of chickens, then in the killing tunnel.
We wanted to know what it was like to work in the ‘killing tunnel’, how the workers were treated, and whether there were any issues in the system. The rapid expansion of the number of chickens in a few years appeared to be beginning to respond to a rise of demand.
Roman explained the lay of the land to us without sentiment in precise detail:
There was 4 killers plus myself. The chickens came down hung upside down on a conveyer line and we just nicked their vein behind the left ear. Then from there to the scold tank of boiling water and into the plucking machine. All up it took about 2 hours from truck to freezer. The company really looked after the chickens better than the workers at that time. It took 6 to 7 weeks for chickens to reach the weight required, and the most popular size was a no. 7 chicken which was about 3lbs in the old scale.
We wondered what it was like to be involved in this technical system and what it was like to experience that kind of speed and scale. We also wanted to know what happened if the line broke down.
Roman patiently explained:
The killing shifts were built around having morning tea for 20 minutes, then lunch for half an hour, and then shifts which flowed on to the rest of the factory, with a finish by 3 o’clock. The afternoon shift started at 6pm to 9pm with one hour break. The factory hardly ever broke down then. They may sure of that. They had their own maintenance men.
Doing a quick calculation and, assuming Roman’s figures are correct, we discovered that Ingham Chickens may have been processing chickens at a rate of less than 70 per minute in the 1960s (with the rate inevitably slower in the killing tunnel).
Of course, the speeds that Roman described weren’t nearly as fast as contemporary poultry slaughterhouses now achieve, at over 170 bird per minute, and increasing. If Roman in the 1960s helped 32,000 chickens be killed and processed per day, in the largest slaughterhouses now up to 320,000 can be killed and processed. This experience seems unimaginable in scale but Roman’s description of the job helps us understand how gradual increases and technological change may have made the unimaginable challenge possible today.
We asked Roman to elaborate on how the workers were treated and their turnover at the time:
The woman supervisor for the women [at Ingham’s] was like a gestapo to them. They employed about 300 women mainly for the evisceration line (cleaning out the chicken’s insides) and packing in out of the freezers. They were mainly non-English speaking women but were not frightened of work or too scared to speak out, even though the union rep was a floor lady hired by Ingham’s. There were about 30 to 40 men mainly in the freezers, unloading trucks and hanging the chickens. The chickens were transported by trucks from the sheds by a contractor who was somehow related to management. Staff turnover was… well let’s say the English speaking women would last a day on the cleaning line, the women were there to do a job and they did it.
As is so often in the expansion of the modern world, jobs dealing with waste and filth also expanded. Migrant women appeared in a post-protectionist Australia to offer other Australians a chance to forget about this dirty work. It was clearly a difficult job to be stuck on the evisceration line. Roman did not seem to find his work as challenging as some of the women, but we wondered why he decided to leave Ingham Chicken:
I never ate chicken for about 2 years. I still really enjoyed working there but then they decided to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken it was getting more and more demanding, that’s when left. I left before KFC came to reality, but I think that the machinery had had its use-by-date because the chickens were being damaged in the process of processing. The chicken pieces were also still costing too much to sell to the public. KFC was already in Australia at that time, so what better opportunity for Ingham’s to expand and take over the business.
Through Roman, we have a glimpse into the full emergence of the Broiler Chicken Revolution. In this phase of expansion, Ingham Chicken began creating the foundations for the unprecedented scale and business success that made the demand for chicken the dominant force in the meat industry in Australia, as in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The chicken meat industry in Australia grew five-fold in the 1960s and doubled again in the 1970s, in periods of growth that have laid the foundations for our current consumption patterns.
Roman signed off our interview by giving us one final insight, this time into how the everyday consumer in supermarkets experienced this Revolution:
It was funny, because at the time chickens were bagged in numbers to weigh them, and there were 4 different brands: Tender Joy which was a Woolworth’s, Ingham’s which was the company brand, Sunkist, and Birds Eye. All these brands came out of the same Ingham’s processing plant. I used to see women in supermarkets arguing over which were the better brand, and they were all packed in the same factory.
The humor of the branding of the essentially same products from the one factory system captures perfectly the way in which the Broiler Chicken Revolution was able to integrate so effectively into the lives of people. These newly minted meat consumers went from home to supermarket and back again, never seeing the factory farm that facilitated their discernment and pleasure.
You would not eat chicken ever again
We are grateful to Roman for sharing his story, as it has given us insights into some of the paradoxes of our modern age.
On the one hand, many people today will celebrate the affordability and universal convenience of chicken meat. On the other, when people learn of the extreme conditions in which broiler chickens are now being raised, they may no longer wish to consume the end product. As an insider, Roman told us how working for Ingham Chickens made him want to stop eating chicken for two years.
But as Steven Pinker explained, the Broiler Chicken Revolution was responsible for singlehandedly wiping out the impact of the Animal Rights Revolution. The staggering rise in the number of chickens exposed to cruelty has eclipsed any gains made by animal welfare advocates.
Despite what we may assume or what we hear all the time, chickens are not stupid. They surpass the intelligence of cats and dogs in some tests. Spending time with them away from intensive farms will reveal animals who have their own unique personalities.
As new protein alternatives rise in popularity, this may very well turn the tide for chickens and one day make intensive broiler farms obsolete. Today plant-based proteins are becoming more affordable and accessible, providing plenty of protein, along with delicious textures and flavors very similar to chicken meat.
Twenty-first century advances in technology are paving the way for a new Plant-Based Revolution. Lab-grown cellular meat is on the way, too.
If you’re inspired by Roman’s story, you may want to join us in trying more plant-based or vegan alternatives. For more information about reducing or cutting out your chicken consumption, and telling your friends and family about it, head to One Step for Animals in the United States and in Australia.
Open for Animals is a new animal advocacy group founded in 2019. It is open to anyone who wants to learn more about helping animals.
Story and interview by Beornn McCarthy. Edited by Rachel Donovan.
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