Gisolfi, Monica R. (Author)
Sutter, Paul S. (Author)
University of Georgia Press
Physical Details: 124
Language: English
Economists have described the upcountry Georgia poultry industry as the quintessential agribusiness. Following a trajectory from Reconstruction through the Great Depression to the present day, Monica R. Gisolfi shows how the poultry farming model of semivertical integration perfected a number of practices that had first underpinned the cotton-growing crop-lien system, ultimately transforming the poultry industry in ways that drove tens of thousands of farmers off the land and rendered those who remained dependent on large agribusiness firms.Gisolfi argues that the inequalities inherent in the structure of modern poultry farming have led to steep human and environmental costs. Agribusiness firms―many of them descended from the cotton-era South’s furnishing merchants―brought farmers into a system of feed-conversion contracts that placed all production decisions in the hands of the poultry corporations but at least half of the capital risks on the farmers. Along the way, the federal government aided and abetted―sometimes unwittingly―the consolidation of power by poultry firms through direct and indirect subsidies and favorable policies. Drawing on USDA files, oral history, congressional records, and poultry publications, Gisolfi puts a local face on one of the twentieth century’s silent agribusiness revolutions.
...MoreReview Claire J. Du Laney (2019) Review of "The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness". Agricultural History (pp. 376-378).
Similar Citations
Book
Mark V. Wetherington;
(2021)
American Agriculture: From Farm Families to Agribusiness
(/isis/citation/CBB568939915/)
Book
Wittering, Shirley;
(2013)
Ecology and Enclosure: The Effect of Enclosure on Society, Farming and the Environment in South Cambridgeshire, 1798--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001420312/)
Book
Dohner, Janet V.;
(2002)
The Encyclopedia of Historic and Endangered Livestock and Poultry Breeds
(/isis/citation/CBB000201600/)
Book
Marez, Curtis;
(2016)
Farm worker futurism: speculative technologies of resistance
(/isis/citation/CBB095155438/)
Article
Hamilton, Shane;
(2014)
Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post--World War II United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001421293/)
Article
Firkus, Angela;
(2010)
The Agricultural Extension Service and Non-Whites in California, 1910--1932
(/isis/citation/CBB001021194/)
Book
Hahn, Barbara;
(2011)
Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB001220603/)
Book
Fitzgerald, Deborah;
(2003)
Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB000301699/)
Book
Charles, Daniel;
(2003)
Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food
(/isis/citation/CBB000301884/)
Article
Ott, Daniel;
(2014)
Producing a Past: McCormick Harvester and Producer Populists in the 1890s
(/isis/citation/CBB001320831/)
Book
Michael J. Lansing;
(2015)
Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB453507115/)
Article
Julia R. S. Bursten;
Catherine Kendig;
(2021)
Growing Knowledge: Epistemic Objects in Agricultural Extension Work
(/isis/citation/CBB028916046/)
Book
Swanson, Drew A.;
(2014)
A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South
(/isis/citation/CBB001422341/)
Article
Simons, Peter;
(2015)
Aviation's Heartland: The Flying Farmers and Postwar Flight
(/isis/citation/CBB001422240/)
Article
Anne Effland;
(2021)
Small Farms/Family Farms: Tracing a History of Definitions and Meaning
(/isis/citation/CBB720739392/)
Book
Dvera I. Saxton;
(2021)
The Devil's Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice
(/isis/citation/CBB347232041/)
Article
Tom Brooking;
(2019)
“Yeotopia” Found … But? The Yeoman Ideal that Underpinned New Zealand Agricultural Practice into the Early Twenty-First Century, with American and Australian Comparisons
(/isis/citation/CBB390264948/)
Article
Anne Effland;
(2021)
Introduction: Forum: Ideology of the Small Family Farm and Its Influence on US Public Policy
(/isis/citation/CBB703957674/)
Article
Albert G. Way;
(2023)
The Grass Problem: Agrostology, Agriculture, and Environmental Transformation in the New South
(/isis/citation/CBB300240604/)
Article
Prodöhl, Ines;
(2013)
Versatile and Cheap: A Global History of Soy in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001421542/)
Be the first to comment!