Monica Gisolfi's The Takeover is a stimulating, if brief, history of twentieth-century southern poultry farming and one path toward modern agribusiness. The core of the book examines chicken production in four North Georgia counties from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s. She identifies these counties—Cherokee, Forsyth, Hall, and Jackson—as the epicenter of commercial American poultry and these decades as the crucial period when raising chickens transitioned from a farm sideline to an intensive business. Rather than a natural agricultural evolution, Gisolfi argues, this transition was facilitated by a set of government actions that supported poultry integrators and harmed small farmers.
Gisolfi's core argument is an important one. A central myth of poultry production—indeed, of all American commodity agriculture—is that it emerged as an organic response to market demands; consumers sought cheap chicken, and as a consequence, poultry producers became ever more efficient (read: larger, with narrower profit margins). The Takeover reveals that a great deal of government intervention and funding drove the transformation of chicken raising in North Georgia from small farming to agribusiness. During the New Deal, Agricultural Adjustment Act money was invested in poultry research, federal funds improved routes used to truck chickens to market, and rural electrification made lighting and heating poultry barns possible. World War II prompted federal purchases of chickens to feed the troops, while government demands for inspection and standardization favored large operators over backyard flocks. In addition to federal programs, county- and state-level institutions (most notably in this study, the University of Georgia) used tax dollars to support poultry research and marketing. Finally, government efforts connected with the “green revolution” aided in spreading the poultry business model across the globe.
The Takeover also offers a clear explanation of the steps along poultry raisers’ path to dependency. North Georgia cotton farmers, accustomed to that staple's crop-lien model, accepted similar financing for chicks and feed, and feed mills and other lenders embraced the system as well. Integrators—businessmen who brought together various elements of chicken production, from producing feed and chicks to processing carcasses for market—intentionally left the riskiest part of the endeavor, raising the birds themselves, to farmers, who took out loans for costly chicken houses and feed. Once growers took the financial plunge, integrators who monopolized regional markets could periodically demand that they upgrade buildings and technology or risk being stuck with a large loan and no chickens to help pay it off. As a result, by the late 1960s, “broiler farmers were providing more than 60 percent of the capital to run the million-dollar poultry industry, had no say in production and marketing decisions, and earned so little that they were forced to work off the farm to make ends meet and feed their families” (p. 38). In this respect, Gisolfi is correct in identifying the southern poultry industry as the epitome of twentieth-century agribusiness, and its “farmers” as but agricultural wage laborers.
At just seventy-two pages of text, The Takeover is very short for a monograph, and many readers will be left wanting more. There is much to be said for concision, especially in a scholarly world where books often belabor their arguments well past the point of welcome, but this study rigorously steers away from elaboration and discursion that might make for a richer narrative. One result of this brevity is that few people grace the pages; even Jesse Jewell—the preeminent North Georgia poultry baron—is but sketched. Consumers and consumption are also generally missing; little is said about revolutions in freezing and refrigeration and value-added chicken products, nor does the author discuss advertising or marketing partnerships. Readers might be forgiven for leaving the book with the facile assumption that increased chicken production simply created greater demand.
More puzzling still, given the book's publication in the University of Georgia Press's Environmental History and the American South series, the environment as a subject of serious consideration is absent from long stretches of the work. Part of transforming the chicken industry was altering the birds themselves, from foraging fowl into super-efficient living feed-conversion machines through the use of selective breeding, flock management techniques, and stiff doses of antibiotics. In Gisolfi's writing, chickens seem infinitely malleable, the clay of the industry molded into whatever shape integrators and growers chose. The work of environmental historians has done much over the past decades to reveal the ways in which nature reacted to human plans in unexpected ways; this book would benefit from incorporating some of that work, especially studies of domestic animals. The exception to this lacuna is the final chapter, in which Gisolfi outlines the pollution that proved a consequence of massive poultry houses and processing plants, explaining how poultry effluent morphed from “nuisance” to “pollution” as the twentieth century progressed. Discussion of these environmental effects is good, but feels discordant with the rest of the book in this short final chapter, and even here Gisolfi is more interested in human understandings of pollution than in the environmental interactions at work.
Gisolfi's book is certainly a worthwhile contribution, but it is most revealing when read in conjunction with other scholarship on southern poultry—such as excellent work by William Boyd, Leon Fink, and Steve Striffler—that focuses in more detail on the human and animal histories tied to this crucial agricultural transformation.
