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Farming Without Farmers: Deskilling in Contract Broiler Farming

Social scientists and food studies scholars have shown an enduring interest in how

food is produced in our largely industrialized food system. However, there has been little

research about the organization of labor on industrialized farms. These sites of production

are mostly privately owned and hidden away from researchers and journalists, who are

often perceived as critics or activists by farmers and other agriculturalists. My

dissertation fills this gap by focusing exclusively on industrialized contract broiler farms.

Contract broiler farming is a model where farmers agree to raise chickens for meat for a

set amount of time, at a rate of pay based on the ratio of feed to chicken weight at

slaughter. Farmers invest in the built infrastructure to execute this process, but the

company they contract for is mostly in control of the upstream and downstream supply

and processing chains that depend on the production of the broiler chicken for their

continued functioning.

I use archival, interview, and ethnographic data to detail the history of broiler

farming, the emergence of contracting, and what the experience of it is like today. The

most significant and novel part of this project is my ethnographic data collected over six

months spent working on two broiler farms contracted with one of the largest firms in the

US. To date, no other researchers have been able to gain this level of access.

In this dissertation, I begin by exploring the role of management, detailing how the

structure of the farming contract and ambiguous supervisory oversight facilitates farmer’s

compliance with company demands. Then, utilizing agricultural and labor scholarship on

deskilling in the labor process, I explore how poultry farming has become deskilled,

robbing farmers of autonomy, the opportunity to agitate for better labor conditions, and

ultimately eroding the intimate knowledge necessary to execute successful animal

husbandry. Finally, I explore the games farmers play at work. While these games obscure

how surplus value is appropriated from the farmer by the contracting firm, they also

demonstrate farmer’s resistance and acquiescence to their deskilling and loss of

autonomy.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uoregon.edu/oai:scholarsbank.uoregon.edu:1794/24222
Date11 January 2019
CreatorsMiller, Elizabeth
ContributorsYork, Richard
PublisherUniversity of Oregon
Source SetsUniversity of Oregon
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
RightsAll Rights Reserved.

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