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My Day as a Turkey Breeder

This is writer Jim Mason's firsthand account of working at a turkey-breeding factory farm. Mason—a renowned lecturer and the author of numerous works, including Animal Factories, the ground-breaking book that he coauthored with Peter Singer—has documented the shocking conditions in factory farms across North America.

Today's factory-farmed turkeys are genetically manipulated to grow so obese that they can no longer reproduce naturally and must be artificially inseminated instead. Determined to investigate and expose this cruel practice, Mason became an artificial inseminator at a Butterball turkey farm in Missouri. He describes his first day on the job below.

I got up at 3:45 a.m., packed a lunch, filled a thermos with hot coffee, and roared off to the Rocky Point Farm near LaRussell, Missouri. I pulled in at about 4:50 a.m. A woman came out of the building and told me to come in and get coveralls and rubber boots. One of the men there told me to go with DeWayne and his crew. DeWayne, a stocky man of about 30, obviously had no time for pleasantries. He hardly looked at me as he barked, "Follow me in your car."

Turkey chicks in factory farms never get to meet their parents. They are born in giant incubators and packed into crates for the trip to the factory farm.

We drove up and down gravel roads through thick timber to a turkey building. DeWayne got out, and I followed him to the building door. He handed me a dust mask and grunted something that I supposed meant to go on inside. Then he barked again, "Get ahold of this and help me take it in." It was the artificial inseminating (AI) machine. About the size of a cheap TV set, it was an air compressor outfitted with dials, valves, and plastic tubes running to a handset, a kind of a fingerless glove, equipped with a trigger and a gadget to hold the "straws"—small tubes—of diluted turkey semen. As we approached the door, a worker hustled out carrying two dead birds, which he unceremoniously pitched by the door.

DeWayne wasn't talking to anyone. There were no introductions to the other workers—all young, surly white men in their twenties. We all went inside. The building was a bird-managing machine. Rows of feeders and waterers hung down from the steel trusses overhead. Along the length of the building ran a double row of metal "nests," dividing the space and the flock of white hens in half.

DeWayne set up the machine at the edge of a pit in the middle of the long "hen house" and turned on the compressor. The pit was approximately a 5-foot square and was waist-deep. The crew consisted of six men. One man's job was to drive about 100 or so birds into this pen. Then two others herded five or six birds at a time into a small wooden and wire-mesh chute, which ran along one side of the pit. Three men worked in the pit: DeWayne, who operated the AI machine, and two "breakers," who grabbed birds from the chute and held them for him. The grabbers/breakers have the hardest job.