_In the beginning, Dale and Paula Boles watched the deliveries with a certain fascination. The chickens came by school bus—fifty thousand of them every nine weeks. Hatchling broilers, often born the morning of the day of their arrival on the farm. The chicks had pinkish feet and a soft yellow down. Each one weighed about half as much as a golf ball. They traveled in the kind of heavy plastic trays used to cart bread shipments into supermarkets.

Dale and Paula would see the delivery man from the chicken company turn off the country lane where they live in rural western North Carolina and watch him guide the bus down the little dirt road that runs through their land. He’d park beside their new twin 20,000-square-foot chicken houses and use a hand truck to deposit half the flock into each house. Forty-nine days later, the chicken company would return to collect the birds for slaughter. By then, they weighed 6 to 6.5 pounds each. Hauling them out was a job for sixteen tractor trailers.

The scope and efficiency of the operation were a thing to behold, and at first, Dale and Paula were proud of their place in it. Paula is in her mid-sixties, Dale five years older. Both grew up not far from their current home in Granite Falls, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Area farmers grow corn, soybeans, apples, and pumpkins. As a teenager, Dale had a job milking cows. His father was a hobbyist cattleman. After Dale’s father had a stroke, Dale and Paula, who’d built a house beside Dale’s parents’ place, maintained the small herd. But Dale worked construction. Paula had an office job. Neither had ever contemplated a career in agriculture.

Then, in 2000, a friend of Dale’s suggested that he look into the chicken business. The man had inherited two poultry houses from his grandparents, and with them, an agreement with Tyson Foods to raise birds. The arrangement was typical of modern livestock production in the U.S. Although some 97 percent of American farms are family owned, the overall number of family-run farms has been in freefall since the 1980s, decreasing by nearly 142,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone. The dominance ofindustrial agribusiness makes it notoriously difficult for family farms to compete, and many theoretically independent livestock producers function as mini-client states of mega meat companies like Tyson, Smithfield, and Cargill, raising huge numbers of single species in concentrated animal feeding operations, otherwise known as factory farms. Contract farming of this kind is especially prevalent in the poultry business, which is largely concentrated in the South: Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina.

Dale knew he wouldn’t be able to work construction forever. His back was beginning to bother him, and the way his friend told it, raising chickens paid well. He and Paula met with representatives from Tyson at a KFC—a major Tyson customer—to hear their pitch. Later, Tyson took them to dinner at a fancy restaurant. The company showed them documents from contract farmers it was working with, illustrating the kind of money they could make. 

Paula and Dale were convinced. Following strict factory farming specs, they commissioned a contractor to build their chicken houses—long, gray buildings made of lumber and corrugated metal. A third structure, known as a litter shed, was open at the ends, with a concrete floor and wooden fences on the sides. It would hold manure. All three buildings had soaring, peaked tin roofs. With sharp, modern lines, they made a surprisingly handsome tableau. By 2006, Dale and Paula had a contract with Tyson to raise about 250,000 chickens per year at 5 cents a pound. Based on the company’s representations, they expected annual revenues of $120,000 to $150,000.

_Industrial poultry houses are minutely regulated environments, outfitted with mechanized food and water supply systems, medication dispensers, and dozens of adjustable heaters and fans. Startup expenses for the Boleses’ chicken farm came to about $400,000, for which they took out a ten-year loan. For the time being, Dale and Paula kept their day jobs, dedicating poultry revenues to loan payments and handling farm work during off hours. The family had no other debt. They lived frugally, forgoing vacations. Once they settled their loan, Dale and Paula figured they’d be looking at a nice supplemental income that would see them into retirement. One day, they hoped to pass the business on to their two sons, who were teenagers at the time.

Every morning at four, Paula walked the houses—checking to make sure the feed motors were running, that a heater hadn’t gone down, that the water lines remained unclogged. She’d note anything that looked amiss and tell Dale. After he finished at his day job, in the late afternoon, he’d address what needed addressing, sometimes working until near midnight. Major repairs he tackled on weekends. Some of the most labor-intensive days in each cycle came after Tyson had picked up a flock for processing. At that point, Paula and Dale had two weeks to ready their houses for the next batch. This involved transferring roughly seven tons of manure and sawdust to the litter shed, where it would become a potent fertilizer.

Tyson ran a tournament system. After a pickup, the company would rank each contract farmer against others who’d delivered a flock around the same time. The main performance metric was feed conversion: quantity of chicken food in versus live poundage out. Along with mechanical knowhow, Dale brought to the business a competitive spirit he’d honed as a high school athlete and during eight years in the U.S. Air Force. For several years, Paula says, she and Dale never finished lower than third. Farmers who podiumed thrice in a row got a $25 Tyson Foods gift certificate. It was difficult not to notice that the prizes resembled company-town scrip. But it was nice to be recognized.

_Four or five years into their relationship with Tyson, Dale and Paula began to sense that crucial information had been omitted from the company’s pitch. It was around that time that they got their first bad flock. Many of the birds were feeble and did not survive to harvest time. Dale complained and was told it was the luck of the draw—everyone got a bad flock sometimes. According to data compiled by the National Chicken Council, broilers have a mortality rate of about 6 percent over their seven-week lifespan, or roughly 3,000 dead chickens per 50,000.

But when other sickly flocks followed, the company’s explanation shifted: Dale and Paula were to blame for their faltering performance. The chicken house computers gave Tyson access to mountains of data. Paula explained, “They can always find something: Well, there were two nights when you let them get a little too cold, or too hot.” Finally, Tyson told Dale he simply wasn’t spending enough time in the houses. He would have to quit his construction job.

Money became tight. A top-notch flock could bring in up to $24,000. But the family’s loan payment was $8,900, which Tyson sent directly to the bank. And over time, the company offered fewer subsidies for operating costs like propane, which regularly came to $25,000 per year, and sawdust—perhaps another $6,000.

The ammonia that is a byproduct of chicken manure corrodes metal, necessitating frequent equipment replacements, and companies like Tyson require contract farmers to make updates to incorporate new technology and machinery. “They tell you that upgrades are not mandatory,” Paula said wryly. “But if you don’t do them, they don’t bring you chickens.” Over six or seven years, the bill for these upgrades totaled around $100,000, for which Dale and Paula took on additional debt. A perplexed acquaintance once told Dale, “I’ve heard that chicken farmers make a lot of money, and then I’ve heard people say that chicken farmers don’t make anything at all.” Dale replied, “Well, they’re both right. You make $100,000, and you can say: Hey, I made six figures this year. But if you spent $110,000, you might as well be working at McDonald’s.”

Paula tried to stay optimistic. “Every time we had a bad flock, I’d say, Well, they have to give us a better flock next time.” She and Dale saw themselves as protagonists in a familiar American story. “We thought, you have to work hard, you have to risk, you have to put a lot of effort in if you want a good return,” she said. “We thought, we’re doing it. Next year, it’s gonna be good.” 

But Dale was growing disenchanted; he felt like an indentured servant. Their compensation never went up, even as overhead rose, and the business model gave them virtually no autonomy. The temperature and air in their chicken houses, what the birds ate and how much they were allowed to move around, the medication in their water—Tyson dictated all of it. Yet contract farming provided an illusion of ownership that was useful to the company. Paula reflected, “When your alarm goes off at three in the morning because a heater’s gone out and that’s your livelihood—no one’s going to take care of it the way you take care of it yourself.”

The longer Dale and Paula were in the poultry business, the harder it was to feel good about what they were doing. The chickens led bizarre, brutal lives. When they arrived on the farm, the lights in their windowless houses were kept on for twenty hours a day, which kept them active and eating. “As they get bigger, you don’t want them to move as much,” Paula said. “You just want them to get fat, so you would keep it dimmer. They would move around just enough to eat.” In the last century, the average size of a broiler chicken has nearly tripled, the result of selective breeding, overfeeding, and the widespread use of antibiotics. The birds’ rapidly swelling breasts stressed their tiny organs, and some suffered heart attacks. Others suffocated in the muck, their legs broken from top-heaviness. Even with a relatively healthy flock, toward the end of a cycle, there’d be ten or fifteen dead chickens a day to collect.

 One Saturday in 2015, Paula and Dale returned to their house having spent the afternoon picking up corpses. They’d fallen behind on their mortgage to keep up with farm expenses and Paula had drained her 401(k). Tyson wanted them to do another upgrade, which would cost $30,000. Their marriage was strained. “My husband’s yelling at me: What’s happened to the money?! Why don’t we have the money!? I’m saying: Well, if you’d do a better job of taking care of the chickens, we’d make more money!” They’d accepted the idea that they were responsible for their poor fortunes, and a sense of isolation had set in. Paula said, “It’s not like you want to stand on the steps at church on Sunday and tell everybody you’re a failure.”

Searching online that day for anything that looked like a life raft, they found a YouTube video featuring another North Carolina poultry farmer. Craig Watts had been raising chickens on contract for Perdue for more than twenty-three years. “We sat and watched it and just cried because the whole story he was telling, we were living,” Paula said. Like the Boleses, Watts had been convinced he’d quickly extinguish his startup loans and be in business for himself. Instead, he would remain in debt for thirty years. As he put it in the video, “This stuff is not as advertised.”

_Craig Watts had produced the video with Leah Garcés, an activist who was then the American director of the nonprofit Compassion in World Farming. Perdue, Tyson, and their competitors forbid contract farmers from allowing public access to their facilities. But after seeing an advertisement in which Jim Perdue, the company’s chairman, described the importance of “treating your chickens humanely,” Watts was indignant. He decided to go rogue and invited Garcés to film inside his poultry houses. The footage showed chickens gasping for breath, raw and featherless on their undersides from lack of movement. Perdue suggested Watts was mismanaging his operation. But chicken companies monitor contract facilities closely, and Perdue didn’t explain why it would do business for so long with a farmer who wasn’t following its protocols. Reached for comment, a Perdue spokesperson told me that the company “has positive, productive relationships with the 1,800 poultry farmers who raise our flocks,” and pointed me to an ongoing federal lawsuit in North Carolina filed by Perdue against Watts and others that claims, in part, that Watts “disregarded the welfare of the chickens under his care.”

The video inspired a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times and a segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Garcés went on to become CEO of Mercy For Animals, a nonprofit focused on ending factory farming. In 2019, she founded a sister organization, the Transfarmation Project, a kind of escape-and-recovery group for contract farmers. It helps livestock producers transition out of industrial meat production, working with them to repurpose their land and infrastructure to create sustainable new businesses growing crops like mushrooms, hemp, vegetables, and flowers. Much of its work has been with farms in the South. Four are in North Carolina and others are in Texas and Georgia, all of which have some of the nation’s largest concentrations of factory farms.

In 2019, Watts became one of the first farmers to work with the Transfarmation Project. Backed by a grant from the group, he installed a shipping container inside one of his old poultry barns and used it to begin growing mushrooms. In northeastern Texas, the group guided the Halley family in their transition from contract poultry to hemp and awarded funds to help them set up a donkey rescue program in a former cattle pasture. A third grant went to the Barkers, former contract dairy farmers in North Carolina who are in the process of repurposing their property for a fruit and vegetable operation.

Like many contract farmers, Watts has an emotional attachment to his land, which has been in his family for generations, and to the practice of agriculture. “It’s part of me, in the blood,” he has said. “It’s a calling. I like to watch things grow.”

But vocation is one thing, remuneration another. The cost to convert poultry and swine infrastructure ranges from about $87,500 for strawberries to nearly $150,000 for tomatoes. With relatively low initial expenses and high demand, mushrooms—including varieties like blue oyster, lion’s mane, and reishi—have proven to be the easiest point of entry for most Transfarmation farmers. A financial analysis by the group projects highly variable profitability. Depending on the crop, each chicken barn converted to a greenhouse might yield an annual operating profit of $26,000 to $284,000, plus an hourly wage of about $17 to the farmer. Even at the low end, these figures compare favorably with the poultry business: In 2023, chicken farmers collected a median net income of about $4,800.

Still, for contract growers with significant debt, the numbers often don’t work. Since its founding, the Transfarmation Project has heard from more than 100 interested farmers; the group has worked with fifteen of them. (A few other organizations, including Animal Outlook’s nonprofit Farm Transitions Program and Miyoko’s Creamery’s Dairy Farm Transition Program, do similar work.) The majority of farmers who contact Transfarmation are in poultry and often at a point of generational transition.

Katherine Jernigan, who joined the group in 2021 to manage farmer outreach and became its director last year, told me, “There will be an adult child who’s looking to inherit the farm, and they think, I want to maintain the land but I don’t want to suffer through what I’ve seen my parents suffer through.”

Ideally, farmers reach out before they’ve exited their livestock contracts. That way, they still have an income, however unsatisfactory, and are less likely to need immediate cash. Remaking a farm is slow work. Craig Watts, for example, didn’t harvest his first fungi until 2023, four years after he began his transition, and for now, he supplements his income with another job. It can be made slower if facilities have been left to decay; pipes rust, rafters disintegrate, varmints nest and chew through wiring. “You want an exit runway and a startup runway,” Jernigan said.

Once a farmer is enrolled, Transfarmation, which has just four full-time employees but works closely with Mercy For Animals staff, assesses their infrastructure, as well as their needs and goals. It helps if the farmer has some notion of what they’d like to do next, but it’s not required; contract growers often feel trapped in their relationships with big meat companies and have difficulty imagining a future outside factory farming. Finally, Jernigan and company collaborate with the farmer on a customized strategy: drafting a business plan, connecting with local produce buyers, offering advice on how to convert factory farming facilities. Some farmers prefer to rely mostly on the Farmer Toolkit, an online repository of educational materials compiled by Transfarmation and the Farm Transitions Program that covers everything from funding sources to renewable energy. Others avail themselves of hands-on one-on-one training, as well as research and innovation stipends, generally in the $10,000 to $15,000 range. How they approach their transition to some extent depends on their goals. “Some people just want enough income to support their families and keep their land,” Jernigan said. “Others ask, If I went really big, what is the potential there?”

About 76 percent of the poultry and eggs and 74 percent of the hogs commercially raised in the U.S. are produced by contract farmers. Groups like Transfarmation will never be able to interact with more than a tiny portion of these growers directly. Transforming old chicken houses and hog barns into modern greenhouses represents a niche construction specialty, which, as a practical matter, doesn’t exist. Finding tradespeople—builders, plumbers, electricians—who are willing and able to do it can be difficult. “Scalability is something we have been thinking about since day one,” Jernigan said. Her team is at work on a standardized blueprint for factory farm conversion, which Jernigan calls an “incubator model.” She explained, “The process is written out, step by step. Farmers can access it for free and do it at their own pace, without our staff or consultants.”

According to a 2021 Kansas State University study, the average American consumes more than 100 pounds of chicken per year, an increase of 160 percent since 1970. (This much to the consternation of the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which funded the study.) Poultry sales in 2022 generated $76.9 billion—roughly twelve times more than global sales of plant-based proteins. Coaxing tastes and dollars away from chicken and toward herbivorous alternatives represents a complex social, cultural, and economic project to which groups like Transfarmation can contribute only so much.

Yet the plant-based food industry—the businesses producing meatless sausage and burgers, non-dairy cheese, oat milk, and the like—is expected to be worth up to $162 billion by 2030, and Jernigan stressed that to achieve the sort of scale necessary for her group’s farmers to share meaningfully in that bounty, the Transfarmation model will need public policy support. She has two precedents in mind: the raft of state- and federally funded programs that enabled small tobacco farmers—most of them in the South—to switch to crops like sweet potatoes; and the organic food movement, the former province of back-to-the-landers and rarefied chefs that, fueled in part by public funding, has itself become big business. “We are going to need policy to provide pathways for those farmers to continue to be farmers,” Jernigan said. “Otherwise we are going to see a collapse of our food system.”

_Last fall, the Transfarmation Project unveiled its most ambitious conversion to date: a 15,000-square-foot greenhouse constructed from the remnants of a chicken barn about an hour outside Charlotte. The Demonstration Hub, as it’s known, cost the group $200,000 to build. It’s part of a farm owned by Tom Lim, who previously raised contract poultry for Pilgrim’s Pride for nearly two decades. Lim, an immigrant from Cambodia, went deeply into debt making upgrades, but the company was unsatisfied. “They start to put pressure: If we don’t see improvement, you’ll lose the contract,” Lim told me. “It’s a nightmare for us.” In 2018, Pilgrim’s Pride ended their relationship. (Pilgrim’s Pride did not respond to a request for comment.) Five years later, Lim began working with Transfarmation. The Demonstration Hub, where he grows lettuce, fennel, tomatoes, and cucumbers, among other things, is a complement to the group’s incubator model—a working archetype other farmers can visit and learn from. A second hub, on a former hog farm in Iowa, is planned. 

Like many former contract farmers, Lim—having long been a cog in a vertically integrated machine—had no connections to local markets and little notion of how to navigate them. Jernigan enumerated some common related conundrums. “Sometimes the purchaser has a laundry list of things they need the farmer to do,” she said. Delivery and packaging requirements, for example, can be rigid, and crops don’t always cooperate with corporate schedules. Other considerations arise: Is it worth pursuing organic certification? Better to target wholesale buyers, who will make large but discounted purchases, or farmers’ markets, with repeat lower-volume customers and higher prices?

Transfarmation connected Lim with his biggest buyer, a community-supported agriculture co-op, or CSA, and for a time, he was making good money. But his experience underlines Jernigan’s emphasis on the need for public support. Lim never generated enough profit from mushrooms and veggies to quit the job he took after parting ways with the chicken company, and last year, the CSA closed, citing economic headwinds—a blow to the two dozen producers that relied on it. Lim has another wholesale buyer, but they’ll take only certain of his crops, and in a landscape dominated by Big Ag, the universe of alternatives is small. “I feel grateful, happy to get back to farm on the land,” Lim said. “The only thing I’m worried about: where can I sell?”

Ironically, independent growers closer to urban areas—dense with farm-to-table restaurants, think-global-act-local totes, and markets and co-ops that form to meet demand—often fare better. “A farmer there is going to have more ease,” Jernigan said. “Versus places that have been so decimated by industrial Ag that those throughways don’t exist anymore.”

_It’s a dynamic with which Paula and Dale Boles are familiar. “There’s not enough yuppies in the area!” Paula quipped when I visited their farm on a recent afternoon. Watts’s video had lifted a veil, dispelling the sense that she and her husband were alone in their struggles. After watching it, they wrote a letter to Tyson requesting to cancel their contract.

Tyson agreed, but Dale and Paula were struck by how little the company seemed to value their relationship. Paula remembered the day an employee came to remove the Tyson sign from their property. “Dale said he never felt so much like a fool in his life,” she said. “You’ve got your life invested—everything we went through. Our marriage about didn’t survive it. It aged us both so much. To see them come out and take the sign and drive off . . . You feel like someone has damaged you so bad, and they just look at you and walk away.” (Tyson did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)

Their first exit strategy involved remaking feed silos as fish tanks to raise tilapia. Dale removed the tin roof from one of their chicken houses and sold it for seed capital. But aquaponic startup costs proved too steep. Instead, Dale reconfigured virtually every electrical, plumbing, and computer system in the barn to grow vegetables and flowers, MacGyver-ing some old refrigerators as germination chambers. Paula set up a smaller greenhouse as a roadside market. They had a lot of fertilizer on hand. “It was some of the prettiest vegetables you’ve ever seen,” Paula said. “Twice as big and beautiful as what you’d see at the hardware store.”

In 2022, Dale and Paula made their final bank payment, twenty years after the start of what was meant to be a ten-year loan; the following year, they received a Transfarmation grant, which they will use to modernize their greenhouse. Paula hopes to leave her office job in the next few years and Dale is retired. On the day of my visit, he was working on the litter shed, which he and Paula are converting into an events space. It is set among soft green hills against a backdrop of woodlands and mountains—postcard pretty. A wedding was booked for spring.

The couple’s years in the chicken business had alienated them from neighbors, who were restricted from the premises, and some of whom complained about the smell. Paula imagines the venue as a draw for locals: church groups, birthday parties, reunions. “We’ve got two fishponds down below the hill there,” she said. “I would just like to have something for the community.” At her farm stand, she specializes in flowers she remembers her grandmother growing around vegetable gardens and enjoys explaining to customers how they can be used to keep bugs away. “I’ll tell them the story. If you know the flower is serving another purpose, people are more inclined to buy.” Dale pulled up in a pickup truck, grimy from his labors. Where Paula is bubbly, he is laconic, with a droll sense of humor. “You wanna get in the chicken business?” he asked me, grinning. Then he drove off to get clean. 

This story appears in the Summer 2025 print edition as “Getting Out of the Chicken Business.” Order the Y’all Street Issue here.