Author: Isaac Arnsdorf

Black Farmers Say a Top Chicken Company Turned Them Away

New allegations surfaced in a lawsuit after ProPublica’s investigation of Koch Foods in Mississippi. The company denies discriminating against Black farmers. Once or twice every year since 2005, a Black farmer in Philadelphia, Mississippi, reached out to one of the country’s largest chicken companies about starting to work with it. […]

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Trump’s USDA Is Letting Factories With Troubling Safety Records Slaughter Chickens Even Faster

Workers are getting injured, but the Department of Agriculture says their safety is not its responsibility. Sixty miles northeast of Atlanta, a chicken statue atop a 25-foot monument proclaims the small city of Gainesville, Georgia, the “Poultry Capital of the World.” In the rolling hills outside of town, white feathers […]

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Chicken Farmers Thought Trump Was Going to Help Them. Then His Administration Did the Opposite.

The Agriculture Department is barely enforcing regulations on big meat companies. By late 2016, many of the nation’s 25,000 chicken farmers said they had grown bitterly frustrated by the administration of President Barack Obama. Under Obama, top officials had promised to help farmers by tightening regulations on meat processing companies, […]

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