It was one of the more memorable scenes in the award-winning 2009 documentary, Food Inc. Carole Morison, a contracted chicken farmer working with Perdue for more than 23 years, gave viewers a glimpse of the horrors of factory farming: birds crippled by their unnatural weight, piles of dead birds, the overwhelming stench of ammonia burning her eyes and throat. Perdue dropped its contract with Morison in 2008, but now the farm is thriving with chickens being raised sustainably.

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today, while the number of independent farmers has been virtually wiped out—the more than 1.6 million in the 1950s have been replaced by fewer than 30,000 farms today, most of which are large concentrated factory farms, according to a new report by the Pew Environmental Group titled Big Chicken: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.”