Tyson, in a separate statement, said "we depend on and want them to succeed. It also pointed out that when grain prices spiked a few years ago, chicken companies ate huge losses, while contract farmers, who didn't have to pay directly for the feed, were protected. Responded with two pages of quotes from poultry producers who stoutly defend the contract growing systems. The National Chicken Council, an industry lobbying group, Leonard tells the stories of farmers who've fallen into bankruptcy, and implies that this outcome is almost inevitable. "The farmer takes the brunt of the volatility the farmer swallows the worst of the losses when there is a problem with their chickens." "Almost invariably, from everything I've seen, the farmer loses," he told Leonard depicts that relationship as something like a con game run by the companies for their own benefit. They supply the feed, and the feed additives. They deliver the chicks on their own schedule - in fact, they aren't required to deliver any flocks at all. In this system, the farmer owns the chicken houses, but the poultry companies are very much in control. That relationship is often called "contract farming." It was invented by the poultry industry, but is now gaining ground in the pork and beef industries, too. Leonard's book, however, is probably the most detailed account of the inner workings of Tyson, as well as the relationship between poultry companies and the not-so-independent farmers who actually raise the birds. Just a few weeks ago, the Pew Charitable Trusts released its own Hearings on alleged abuses by companies that dominate the meat business. In the early days of the Obama administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Justice Department held public Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, have been fighting against concentration in the poultry and meat-packing industries for many years. Rural Advancement Foundation International and the Activist groups devoted to farmers' rights, such as Leonard has no admiration at all, though, for the system of chicken production that Tyson built, which "keeps farmers in a state of indebted servitude, living like modern-day sharecroppers on the ragged edge of bankruptcy." He saw that chicken would soon replace beef or pork as the most popular meat in the United States." (For more, listen to the entire interview.) "Don Tyson had the ability to see the world as it did not yet exist. "I think he was a genius," Leonard tells NPR's Renée Montagne on
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