Fed up with a system that may harm both bird and man, southern poultry farmers consider the future.
Words by Moni Basu | Photos by Mallory Cash
May 21, 2025
On my drive east from suburban Charlotte, the cacophony of strip malls and traffic faded to an undulating, lush landscape that sometimes melded with the murky skies ahead. I was traveling to the Carolina Piedmont, to Anson County, through which the Great Pee Dee River snakes its way from the Appalachians to the Atlantic. To Tom Lim’s farm, not far from the river’s banks.
I passed by fields that once grew tobacco and cotton and towns that once cured that tobacco and milled that cotton before cigarettes fell out of favor and textiles got outsourced, leaving behind shuttered barns, factories, and, eventually, ghosts. What has been steady here through the decades is livestock farming: cows, pigs, and chickens. Anson County has 421 farms and 96 percent of its agricultural sales are of livestock. These are not farms as the average American may conjure, where animals roam free on verdant pastures, loved and nurtured like family pets. On these farms, warehoused animals are raised, often in cruel conditions, for the sole purpose of human consumption. And the farmers themselves are often mistreated and exploited for corporate profit. Lim was one of them.
About 1.7 billion (yes, billion) animals are currently in confinement to satisfy America’s hunger for meat, according to an analysis of USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture done by the nonprofit group Food and Water Watch. That is almost 50 percent more than it was at the start of this century (yes, since 2000). The boom in chicken consumption is particularly startling. In 1960, consumption of broilers — chickens raised solely for meat — was 28 pounds per person, the National Chicken Council estimates. In 2025, that number is projected to soar to 103 pounds. Americans consumed almost 1.5 billion chicken wings on this year’s Super Bowl Sunday alone.
My own meat consumption has fluctuated over time. I spent a good chunk of my formative years in India when being middle class meant something vastly different than it does today. We had little disposable income and not enough wealth to routinely eat meat. We consumed lentils, yogurt, eggs, and freshwater fish for protein. We ate chicken or mutton on the occasion of a birthday or anniversary. But when I reached ninth grade in Florida, I found myself under the golden arches of McDonald’s and in line at KFC. My college friends and I frequented Sonny’s BBQ on all-you-can-eat Mondays, wrapped greasy chicken legs and thighs in napkins and stuffed them into our bookbags. It was a cheap way to eat.
I, like so many Americans, eventually grew more conscious of how I was nourishing my body and somewhere along the way, I gave up eating beef and pork altogether. But chicken remained a steady part of my diet — I craved a Blue Plate fried chicken special from a meat-and-three and my guilty pleasure remained a Popeyes two-piece dark meat dinner with red beans and rice and a biscuit on the side.
But about a year ago, I stumbled upon a Netflix documentary series, “You Are What You Eat.” It was late-night TV viewing, but I sat up straight in my recliner as the film revealed unsavory truths about how our food is sourced. I live in Georgia, the nation’s top producer of broiler birds, and I knew that poultry production as well as profits had skyrocketed in recent years. Of course, the industry has also been challenged by the current outbreak of bird flu, which has so far led to the culling of about 150 million chickens, including egg-laying hens — not to mention dozens of human infections, and, as we went to press, at least one death. I grew more curious about how poultry farms operated and about the men and women who kept them running. My research led me to Lim, who is now experimenting with alternatives to corporate-driven agriculture, perhaps pointing the way toward a more compassionate and sustainable food supply.
So, on a gray May day, I turned into Lim’s driveway in Wadesboro. He was waiting for me on the edge of his property, his face splattered with sunspots and solemnity. Small in stature, he greeted me in faded jeans and a “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave” T-shirt that peeked out from under his hoodie. His work boots looked like they had clocked infinite hours in chicken sheds.
In 1998, Tom Lim bought a plot of farmland in Wadesboro, N.C., with the hopes of building generational wealth for his family. “It was good at the beginning. Good money, good living. We didn’t really think about much else,” said Lim.
We traipsed through a fraction of the 28 acres of loamy land Lim bought back in 1998; this farm was where he thought he would be able to leave his troubled past behind and start anew in America. Plants and animals were in his blood and he settled on this slice of the Piedmont so that he and his family could grow old in peace and prosperity. That had been his hope as a young refugee.
He purchased this farmland because it already had four barns on it, and Lim set out, like the previous owner, to make a successful living as a contract poultry farmer. He signed on the dotted line with Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of JBS USA, one of four multinational companies that dominate the poultry industry in the United States. The company supplies chicken to familiar restaurants like Popeyes and KFC and grocery chains like Walmart and Kroger.
“It was good at the beginning,” Lim told me. “Good money, good living. We didn’t really think about much else.”
No crystal ball could have foretold what lay in store for Lim. Nothing could have prepared him for the crossroads at which he found himself two decades later.
What remained constant was the modest clapboard house where Lim and his wife Sokchea live, surrounded by a garden brimming with persimmon and crab apple trees, bamboo, bananas, allium, lemongrass, dragon fruit, muscadine vines, tamarind, and turmeric. A shallow pond covered with lotus hinted it would soon burst into hues of pink with summer’s arrival. They were reminders of the home in Cambodia that Lim was forced to flee decades ago.
Lim was born in 1969, the year that the United States launched a secret bombing campaign from Cambodian soil against North Vietnamese forces, which destabilized the country and later created ripe conditions for the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. His early years were spent in the city of Battambang, the youngest son in a family of 15 siblings. His father died in 1975 after which more tragedy followed as civil war engulfed Cambodia.
Lim’s mother, like millions of other Cambodians, fled the city with her children and kept running from village to village to escape the senseless violence and starvation inflicted by the Khmer Rouge. Eventually Lim landed in a United Nations refugee camp in Thailand, where he would spend four long years. A resettlement program brought him first to California for six months and then to Charlotte in 1985.
Lim’s family had always farmed their own vegetables and owned water buffalo, chickens, and goats. Even when they were on the run, they often grew their own food. Lim’s mother taught him to be self-sufficient, however dire the situation.
“My mom used to say, ‘If you want to eat something, then grow it. Never rely on anyone else,’” Lim told me.
Those were the words he lived by.
He thought he would be king on this chicken farm. But contract poultry farming, he would find out, does not work that way.
Lim purchased the 28 acres of farmland, which already had four barns on it, to raise and sell poultry.
On the morning I visited Lim, thick clouds began to roll in and erase our shadows. The air smelled of impending storms. Lim’s pet chickens clucked and squawked and a rooster named Cutie cock-a-doodle-dooed. He owns a half dozen quail and some pigeons, too. They are the happy birds.
On any given week, Lim would have up to 100,000 other birds on his land. Broiler birds. They never saw the light of day.
They spent the entirety of their short lives in the chicken barns that Lim operated for Pilgrim’s Pride. We walked into one, now but an apparition. Rows and rows of bright red feeders still hung from the rafters, pine shavings still lined the ground. Lim spent endless days here, tending to the birds.
Under what’s known as an integrated production system, Pilgrim’s owned all the chickens from the moment they hatched to the moment they arrived as neatly packaged products on grocery shelves. The company supplied the feed and the transportation to the processing plants. Lim provided everything else: the land, sheds, equipment, and, of course, his sweat.
Lim raised 25,000 freshly hatched chicks in each of his four barns. Chickens in the wild can live up to 10 years, but Lim’s broilers grew to maturity in about eight weeks, crammed in so tightly that they could barely move. They lived in near darkness so they would conserve their energy — chickens are naturally in a calmer state at night, which is why trucks often transport them in those hours. They consumed a proprietary mix of grains intended to make them grow fast and abnormally fat.
Frankenchickens, as some animal rights activists call them.
Sometimes, birds would topple over from the weight of their gargantuan breasts and not be able to get up to eat or drink. Some withered away or got trampled by other birds. Or suffered heart attacks because their organs could not keep up with their obese bodies. Others acquired bedsore-like skin lesions from the ammonia produced by the massive amounts of manure, known in the industry as litter. Lim breathed in the acrid smells, exacerbated by the high temperatures and moisture in the sheds.
Pilgrim’s Pride, Lim said, did not pay him for dead or injured birds. They did, however, send instructions on how to snap the necks of injured, sickly, bony or otherwise useless birds before tossing them into an incinerator that still sits on Lim’s land like a relic, a ghastly reminder of the life he once led.
Lim was running a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) or a factory farm. In the years after World War II, meat production in America shifted away from small-scale operations to large numbers of animals raised in confinement. Today, about 99 percent of chickens and hogs and 70 percent of cows are raised this way.
“I just know there is a better way of building a food system,” Lim told me, poking one of his defunct chicken feeders with a stick. “I mean, a better way of eating.”
Most people I know would be outraged if they saw a cat or a dog or even a chicken being tortured in any way. But the abuse of millions of broiler birds from birth to death is largely forgiven as agribusiness. This is what I learned from Leah Garcés, CEO and President of Mercy for Animals, one of the world’s largest farmed-animal rights organizations. Garcés investigates factory farming practices in America and leads a growing movement for change. One of her priorities is to put an end to government subsidies for poultry companies that often take advantage of small farmers like Lim to the point that they no longer feel they are in control of their own farms.
Pilgrim’s Pride did not grant my request for an interview or answer the questions I emailed. But it and other poultry companies insist in statements that their chickens are raised in a humane way. The company-supplied chickens “are moved to local family farms where they live in barns equipped with advanced ventilation and heating systems and are able to freely roam and eat and drink in comfort, under the care of a veterinarian,” according to The National Chicken Council, the trade organization that advocates for poultry companies.
But that is not how Lim and other farmers described their poultry operations. That is not what lawsuits against poultry companies and the USDA have suggested. Animal rights groups have documented over the years a wide range of abuse at factory farms and slaughterhouses. They say that if most Americans knew how their McNuggets or Styrofoam tray chicken had been processed, they would think twice about buying them. But most people will never know. The practices are largely hidden from the public — save driving down a highway behind an occasional truck stuffed with crates of live chickens, feathers fluttering on the road as they travel to their demise.
The nation’s Broiler Belt stretches from eastern Texas, through Arkansas, and into the Southeastern states before extending north to Maryland and Delaware. In some parts of this region, the number of chickens outnumbers the human population.
Like many small chicken farmers, Lim became entrapped in a system that prioritized profits above all else — over the well-being of the farmers, birds, and the environment. He fell into massive debt paying for the operation and maintenance of his aging sheds. The equipment was expensive and the check he collected from Pilgrim’s Pride was often not enough to even cover his monthly electric and propane usage.
“Sometimes, we were in the negative,” he said. “We struggled to pay the bills.”
Pilgrim’s Pride, Lim said, kept pressuring him to jettison outdated manual equipment and upgrade his houses with digital technology. Those improvements came with a stiff price tag and Lim resisted. He was already floundering in debt, almost $200,000 in loans he’d taken out to cover maintenance costs and another $40,000 for his daughter’s tuition at a technical college.
Then one day in 2018, two men in a white truck pulled up to one of Lim’s barns. They told him Pilgrim’s Pride would not be renewing his contract. The chickens Lim saw before him would be his last flock. He had toiled hard for 20 years but the company, he said, discarded him because his barns were old.
There was nothing Lim could do except watch his life’s work vanish in that instant.
Lim and his wife were both forced to find jobs off the farm. She worked as a seamstress; he, at a medical supply company in Monroe, about an hour’s drive west from his farm, where he took on 12-hour shifts for five days and then got a few days off to tend to the farm. He hated that his job forced him off the land he loved.
“I know my heart is in farming,” Lim said, surveying his land. “I don’t want to work a job, but right now the farm doesn’t generate income to support my family.”
Lim had held onto his mother’s words. He knew he had to find another way to farm.
This time, there would be no animals. This time, it would be on his own terms.
Tom Lim raised 25,000 chickens at a time in each of his four chicken sheds. The feeders still hang from the rafters long after he saw his last flock. Lim was under contract to Pilgrim’s Pride, one of four multinational companies that dominate the poultry industry in the United States.
It was the fourth chicken barn, the one that sat closest to the entrance to Lim’s farm, that held the key to his future.
On the day that I visited, construction was still ongoing in the barn’s transformation. Where 25,000 chickens had once jostled for space, now there stood a greenhouse the size of three basketball courts. Where there was once darkness now there was light, glass everywhere to let the sunshine in. Before me was a manifestation of the vision Leah Garcés had: to end factory farming of animals.
One year after Lim lost his chicken contract, Mercy for Animals launched what it called The Transfarmation Project, designed to help farmers transition away from livestock. Instead of cramming chickens, pigs, and cows in crowded, dark cages and pens, they could plant and grow crops.
Garcés had done her homework, crisscrossing the nation to speak with small farmers under contract to big companies. In 2014, she had a breakthrough when she met Craig Watts, another former North Carolina chicken farmer who got fed up with a system in which he said the chickens suffered and the farmers were “hoodwinked.” He became a whistleblower and allowed Garcés to clandestinely film inside his chicken sheds. (Chicken contracts usually forbid outsiders from entering the barns.) The shocking images of sickened, injured, and dead chickens, released to The New York Times, exposed the ills of raising animals this way. The video went viral. Perdue Farms — the mega poultry conglomerate Watts produced for — blamed Watts and took no responsibility for its own animal welfare policies.
Up until that pivotal moment, Garcés, a staunch animal rights activist, had considered factory farmers her enemies. Now, she credits her unexpected friendship with Watts as the start of a critical movement.
“I learned so much from Craig. I learned that most farmers hate factory farming just as much as I do,” she said.
Watts went on to become an advocate for farmers who want to quit raising animals this way. Last year, Garcés published her second book, Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us From Factory Farming. It’s essentially a blueprint for ending the current system of animal farming. Lim became one of Transfarmation’s early beneficiaries.
“Do you want to try something bold and audacious?” former project director Tyler Whitley had asked Lim. “Something that could be really big?”
Lim had little to lose. He would become a prototype and his farm would become the first demonstration hub where other animal farmers could come and see for themselves the alternatives to raising animals.
“After I lost the chicken contract,” Lim told me, “I dreamed a different dream.”
That dream would ultimately be realized in a state-of-the-art greenhouse designed by Virginia Tech horticulturists and built with a grant from Transfarmation. It was intended to maximize specialty crop production. Rows of raised beds for beets, peppers, eggplants, and herbs would vie for space with hydroponic growing systems for microgreens, Swiss chard, and Jericho and romaine lettuces. Toward the back was a “Dutch bucket” system that makes irrigating thirsty vine crops like tomatoes and cucumbers more efficient.
I had met other farmers who had made similar transitions from poultry to plants. Two years after he allowed cameras into his barns, Watts ended his relationship with Perdue and tried his hand at mushrooms. The video of Watts’s poultry farm prompted Dale and Paula Boles to plot their own exit from the industry. They had raised chicken for Tyson on a 40-acre-farm in the quarry town of Granite Falls, the western North Carolina foothills. By the time they raised their last flock, they had fallen $400,000 in debt upgrading and maintaining their two chicken sheds.
Paula told me the couple stopped taking vacations and missed important functions — like a son’s graduation — because they were constantly working in the chicken houses. They never got a raise and instead invested more and more money into their sheds. They feared they would lose their home and Dale’s family land that it stood on. They feared their sons would have to quit college.
“We were indentured servants,” she said.
They dipped into their retirement accounts to manage. They, like Lim, knew they had to start all over again.
In 2015, they removed all the chicken litter and replaced the tin roofs with glass. They cleaned and painted the rafters, laid greenhouse fabric down on the floors and repositioned heaters, cooling cells, vents, and gas and water lines. Dale, a mechanical engineer, did much of the work himself. Then they started experimenting with vegetables. A local farm-to-table eatery in nearby Hickory purchased their microgreens. Paula set up a roadside stand to sell seasonal produce like peppers and tomatoes as well as annuals and perennials.
Paula still works as an account manager at the pet care company SynergyLabs to earn enough to pay their bills. On the day I visited, Dale Boles was preparing a field to plant watermelons. They acknowledged their farm income was not enough to support a family. But at least they were no longer accruing debt. They were not beholden to anyone but themselves.
Now, instead of the fast-paced production of chickens under corporate-mandated conditions, Lim can tend to plants and get back to his farming roots.
Lim, like Watts, first tried mushrooms. With the help of a Transfarmation grant, he bought a used insulated shipping container on Facebook for $4,500. He and Transfarmation’s Whitley drove to Indiana to fetch it. Lim then retrofitted the space.
I followed Lim up a set of stairs into the climate-controlled growing area. The thermostat stays at a cool 65 degrees. Lim flipped on the switch to shine the bright white lights on facing metal shelves each holding blocks of mushrooms: blue oysters, shiitakes, and lion’s manes. A timed sprayer releases fine mist in the air every 15 minutes to keep the humidity levels optimal for fungus growth.
The mushrooms can be harvested between eight and 18 days after spawning, depending on the variety, and can fetch up to $16 a pound, which means mushroom farming can prove profitable. But the set-up costs exceeded $30,000. It would have been a barrier for Lim without grants from Transfarmation.
An even bigger challenge for farmers lies in finding the markets for their products. Lim never had to worry about that when he was under contract with Pilgrim’s Pride. But now, he must find steady buyers. He has sold mushrooms to a CSA and at farmers markets, but his big concern now is how to expand and diversify his customer list.
Dale and Paula Boles feel Lim’s pain. They, too, found their biggest challenge was finding a market for their produce.
“What is your consumer base? Where could you sell your products? What sticks to your soul?” Paula said. “You have to research, research, research. And you have to think outside the box.”
Before the greenhouse, Lim set up a trailer where he grew high-end mushrooms like blue oysters. Mushrooms are fast and relatively easy to grow. They can also fetch a good price at market.
In early September, Garcés and the Transfarmation team arrived in Wadesboro for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Lim’s new greenhouse. Activists, farmers, and journalists gathered that day to celebrate the seeds of hope Lim had planted. His farm would serve as a research center and demonstration hub for other farmers across the South who opted out of meat production.
“Do you feel the hope standing here today?” Garcés said at the ceremonial launch. “In transforming farms, we are changing lives.”
Lim beamed as he and Garcés cut the red ribbon at the entrance of his shiny new greenhouse.
“So many people came,” Lim told me later. “It was a point of pride. I thought, ‘Yes, this is how I will be able to make money.’”
But after the hoopla, things did not quite go as planned.
Lim grew a variety of lettuces that he was forced to donate to nearby churches because he could not find buyers. One of his clients, the produce distributor FreshPoint, told him they required cucumbers and tomatoes, not greens. By early December, the heating system was not functioning properly and the chill that descended on the Carolina Piedmont was too much to keep some crops alive. The cucumbers Lim tried to grow from seedlings froze. Even the mushroom business is not where Lim would like it to be.
“We are making just enough money to keep it going,” he said. “We don’t make a profit.”
He would like to expand the mushroom business; maybe convert one of the other chicken barns into a fungi facility. But that means more money that he does not have. His wife quit her sewing job to work on the farm full time, but Lim still works long shifts at the medical supply company. It’s the only way he can keep paying off his debts, but it’s lost time to find customers for his vegetables.
“I am glad the chickens are over,” Lim said. “I have a different kind of stress now. I have a beautiful greenhouse with no management.”
Katherine Jernigan, the new Transfarmation director, holds out hope for Lim’s farm. His main challenge, she said, is to figure out what to grow and how much of it. Lim, she said, is in a good place because he is not far from a big urban center. He has the potential to make $22,000 a month once his greenhouse and mushroom crops are in full swing.
“It’s difficult for farmers because until you start doing it you don’t know what the boundaries are,” she said. “Tom has been experimenting. The sky’s the limit for him.”
It was obvious the transition for Lim would not be easy. I saw him as someone on the cusp of change trying to figure out a new way forward. It seemed way too early to predict the successes of the Transfarmation project.
I thought of what Garcés wrote in the closing of her book: “We are not going to go from factory farming to no factory farming. As with all systemic change, it won’t happen overnight. We must build pipelines for markets, jobs, farms, and even mindsets. And we must have conviction in this task. This is the fight we are in now, and our futures depend on it.”
Lim now has a state-of-the-art greenhouse designed by Virginia Tech horticulturists and built with a grant from Transfarmation. It features rows of raised beds, a hydroponic growing system, and efficient irrigation for vines.
I stopped eating chicken after my return from Lim’s farm, but ending abusive animal practices does not mean we all have to give up eating meat. I wanted to know more about some of the vendors at my local farmer’s markets who raised animals the old-fashioned way, the way things were done before the advent of industrial agriculture.
Last summer, I visited Shaun Terry at his Grateful Pastures Farm in the rural Georgia town of Mansfield, about an hour east of Atlanta. Terry and his wife Sabrina started their farm in 2015 and are among a small but growing niche of Southern farmers focused on humane and sustainable practices. Terry pasture-raises his chickens — some for meat and others as egg-layers. Last year, he also raised pigs and has plans to acquire cows. He is a far cry from the animal rights activist that Garcés is, but I saw him as an ally in her struggle for improved animal welfare.
“I’ve accepted what life on this planet is. It’s constant life and death,” Terry told me.
But not the kind of life and death that happens on factory farms.
On the morning I visited him, the grass was still wet from the dew when Terry filled bright orange Home Depot utility buckets with an organic mix of soy, oats, alfalfa, and wheat that’s non-GMO and free of pesticides. He started up his 1998 black Toyota pickup that he jury-rigged with a solar panel to power a winch that pulls his mobile chicken coops along the grass. Each 260-square-foot coop houses 130 birds at a time and Terry wakes up before sunrise to move them every day, one pen-length, so that the birds can have fresh grass, soil, and insects to feast upon in addition to the feed Terry lays out. The chicken manure does not build up as it did in Lim’s barns. Instead, it fertilizes the soil.
Lim hopes to profit enough from growing mushrooms and plants that he can quit his off-farm job. But on some days, the road ahead seems rocky.
I watched the chickens as they clucked and picked at the grass. Terry buys 600 freshly hatched chicks every three weeks or so. When they reach eight weeks, he has them transported to a processing center where the birds are killed by hand.
In commercial slaughterhouses, chickens are shackled upside down on conveyor belts, and then stunned with electric shocks or gas before a blade slits their throats and they are dipped in a scalding tank to remove their feathers. The poultry industry insists the system is humane. Animal rights activists say that the shackling process can be extremely stressful and painful for the birds and some birds are either not rendered unconscious before slaughter or are boiled alive in the scalding tanks.
Terry makes 80-90 percent of his income selling chicken and bone broth at farmer’s markets. It took him many years to build up his customer base.
“I wanted to make a very small bump in moving us in the right direction, away from killing ourselves as a species,” Terry said.
I bought some of Terry’s chicken. It tasted different from Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Tyson, and even Whole Foods. It was leaner. Ultimately, it was better for my body. Better for the environment, the animals, and the farmers. Still, reporting this story had flipped a switch in my head. I resumed a pescatarian diet.
A few days before Christmas, I called Lim to catch up with him. His greenhouse was bare with all the problems he had incurred. He knew he was still months, maybe years away, from turning a profit, from reaching a point when he no longer fell asleep at night anxious about money. He would like to quit his off-farm job and spend his days wholly on the land that he bought all those years ago, the land where he intended to fulfill his dreams. One day, he thinks, he will convert the other three chicken barns, maybe even be successful enough to hire employees.
Lim hadn’t figured it all out yet but he had escaped the terrible trap of industrial agriculture. Farming was in his blood and he was not ready to quit. One of the happiest days of his life, he told me, had been that September day when he and Garcés cut the ribbon at his new greenhouse. After the ceremony, he walked over to the cage where he kept his pet birds, opened the door and ushered them all outside. Then, he watched them fly away. ◊
Moni Basui is a journalist, professor, traveler and dog lover. Formally, she directs the low-residency MFA in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Georgia and is the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Writer in Residence. Her e-book, “Chaplain Turner’s War,” told the story of how a green Army chaplain coped in Iraq at the height of the war. A platoon sergeant named her “Evil Reporter Chick” (affectionately, of course) and Basu was featured once as a war reporter in a Marvel comics series. She lives in the ATL with her furry son, Gizmo.
Mallory Cash is an editorial and portrait photographer based in North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the Knoxville Museum of Art and numerous publications.
