

The sound of 13,000 chickens squawking is far more menacing than I would have imagined. As we get closer to the 90 metre-long warehouse, the cacophony vibrates into a growl.





Inside, the buzzing of flies adds to the unsettling soundscape. As we enter, I have to step over a dead bird lying on the ground, its neck mangled from the suffocation it suffered at the hands of its own wired cage. All around me, and into the long corridors of darkness lined with mesh boxes about the same width and height as a laptop, are stressed egg-laying hens. Some peck at their feed manically, others fight for droplets of water from a tiny dispenser, but none of them can seem to stop moving, their dull claws slapping one another as they scramble around their boxes.



These chickens are not like the ones my grandmother used to keep, who would putter around the yard searching for grains and worms, and close their eyes and purr like cats when stroked. These chickens are machines; their wide eyes bulging with fear, their dirty feet cutting into the rusty bars beneath them, their three or four companions per cage jabbing at one another with blunt beaks. They are mutated monsters, created by a population which has overburdened the food industry. But this problem, contrary to what many believe, is not exclusive to first world, highly developed countries. In fact, the "farm" I describe above sits 17 kilometres outside of Chiang Mai city, where Charoen Pokphand Foods (CP, to you and me) has their name stamped on most of the tambon's agribusiness operations.



"CP came to the village offering us farmers fixed prices for our goods," the owner of the egg-laying outfit tells us. "We have to use the food they sell us, and their methods, or else they reject our products."



I look around in disgust at the "methods" that CP has approved, and the fly-infested feed made up of broken rice and fishmeal – hardly close to a chicken's natural, protein-rich diet of grubs, greens and seeds. The farmer says, "I've been with CP for 20 years now – before that, our family were rice farmers. Now we grow corn instead, and I farm these chickens."









This isn't a surprising shift for modern Thai farmers. Massive conglomerate company CP is the country's leader in intensive, industrialised, corporate farming – poles apart from the traditional family-owned farms that Thailand has prospered from in the past. Their main business lines are in livestock and aquaculture; the livestock comprises of broiler chickens (for meat), egg-laying hens, ducks and pork, while their part in Thailand's aquaculture trade has made them the largest producer of shrimp in the world.



As well as huge profits, they also attract criticism, with international investigations alleging they are torturous slave-owners and destroyers of the land and ocean. And you can guess what all those factory-farmed animals are being fed: corn and fish (made into fishmeal), both of which could make a much larger impact if fed to hungry humans instead.



Together with Bangkok-based agribusiness Betagro, these companies are snatching up contracts from all over the country, and effectively stripping Thailand of its time-honoured farming culture by creating high-profit industrial agribusiness in its place. "The company has formed collaborative arrangements with farmers to provide contract farming for broilers and layers…" reads a part of Betagro's mission statement, which basically means these conglomerates are on a mission to dominate traditional "slow farming" until every rice field, pig pen and chicken coop belongs to them.

"My brother also sells to CP," says the chicken owner. "He's got 5,000 chickens, and sells them as meat when they reach 45 days old. My egg-laying chickens are expired after about a year, and then they get picked up by a CP van. They turn those old chickens into meat, too."



A year is a far cry from a hen's natural lifespan of eight to 12 years, with roosters living anywhere from 15 to 20 years. In the world of factory farming, roosters are virtually non-existent – tiny, chirping male chicks are thrown into high-speed grinders on the same day they are born, which is a process known as maceration. In the agro-industry, these animals are worthless because they don't lay eggs and are not favoured by our palates. And so the story goes: as our world grows, and our demands rise, we sacrifice the lives of animals, and not just with death, but with cruel confinement and exhausting practices, which render these living beings deflated and hopeless shadows of what nature intended them to be.