Review: Sarah Chayes on Zephyr Teachout and Monopoly

“I get phone calls continually about suicide,” an Alabama chicken farmer tells Zephyr Teachout. That’s where Teachout, a legal scholar specializing in corruption, starts her new book about the crushing weight of monopoly on American economic and political life. Most economic coverage is written by city-dwellers. When they consider the threat of monopoly, the tech sector is usually top of mind. But, writes Teachout, “to understand the gig economy and the future of work, it helps to understand what is happening in farming.” By launching this superb book in the heartland, Teachout makes one of her most salient points: as with so many issues, rural and urban Americans have powerful interests in common here.

Many of us have been shocked by images from contemporary industrial agriculture. There is that scene in the movie Fresh: The camera zooms in on a couple who raise industrial chickens, looking pinched on their couch as they maintain that their birds are happy. The next scene shows crates of chicks being dumped out on cage floors.

Teachout exposes the corporate structure that undergirds such scenes. The couple’s contract with Tyson or Pilgrim’s or Perdue forbids them from disclosing how much they are paid per chicken. It details exactly how they must run their operation, down to the drugs they administer, the lighting of their barns. The rates paid differ from neighbor to neighbor and are not tied to the retail price of chicken meat. (Farmers are told that those who raise the plumpest chickens get more money per pound, but how can they know?) Processing conglomerates can conduct experiments: for example, giving a new feed mixture to only some farmers. If their birds get scrawny, Perdue has gleaned priceless information, while the families shoulder the cost in lower per-pound prices for lighter birds. Such families, often hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for the buildings they have erected to the processor’s specifications, do not have the option of returning to independence or changing their corporate affiliation.

Teachout shows how this “chickenization” has spread through rural America—to hog and beef production, to corn and soy—forcing nominally free agents from communities that have prized self-sufficiency for generations to serve a remote and unknowable corporate bureaucracy. Its executives do not just go unpunished for the damage they do to livelihoods and localities—they are rewarded, with wealth, celebrity, political influence.