In just 50 years, the chicken industry has transformed itself in fantastic fashion: Skyrocketing 1,400 percent from 580 million birds to the nearly nine billion today, while the number of independent farmers has been virtually wiped out—the more than 1.6 million in the 1950s have been replaced by fewer than 30,000 farms today, most of which are large concentrated factory farms, according to a new report by the Pew Environmental Group titled Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America.”