An in depth examination of Mono-Agriculture in the poultry industry. I found it fascinating

This book is about the triumph of agribusiness and the enormous human and environmental costs that come with it. Although it is focused on american industry (specifically Georgia), one can grasp the worldwide tentacles and externalities permeating almost everything.

The author uses the cotton industry as a historical analogy and she perfectly describes the state-corporation nexus.

I think this is the best work I've ever read about this issue.

This is an economic history of the transformation of upcountry Georgia from increasingly exhaustive cotton sharecropping to large-scale chicken production in the 20th century--with some startling insights into the politics and racial strata of the region, as well as the cooking transformation of chicken as a rare delicacy available when layers were old or roosters were surplus, into the ubiquitous chicken nuggets and huge frozen skinless chicken breasts widely available now. New Deal payments to reduce cotton production allowed white landowners to get into chicken raising while staying on the land as rural "farmers," and USDA research about chicken breeding and disease control and WWII government purchasing of eggs and standardization inspections created the structure for 1950s absorption into a vertically integrated supply chain. With a few huge businesses--Jewell, Tyson, Perdue, Pilgrim's Pride--at the top, suppliers found themselves in the same restrictive contracts as cotton sharecropping as these magnates outsourced all the risk of failure, investment in equipment and specific demands for feed use to the "farmers," who found themselves locked into monoculture, producing astounding amounts of waste and pollution (chicken shit, dead chickens, burned feathers, noise, etc.), heavily in debt and forced to take off-farm jobs (often in public service, like school bus drivers, or on the many southern military bases). Gisolfi is clear about how this process, supported by USDA research and agents, effectively blocked African-American farmers and favored huge producers, while the companies shifted the narrative from independent farmers to farmers as contractors who participated in the system as a "part-time" additional income to explain the small returns and manipulative oversight.