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Amiable Conceit. Not many years ago, most chickens sold in markets were either worn-out hens, roosters, or scrawny cockerels. Now most market chickens are grown only for eating, the result of a genetics race between supermarkets and specialty stores to provide the best eating bird. The meat-type chicken is never referred to by the industry simply as a chicken. It is too much of an all-purpose bird. With its plump breast and slim shanks, at less than a pound, it can be sold as a squab. At a pound it is widely sold as a Rock Cornish game hen (the game hen is an amiable conceit, but it does have Plymouth Rock and Cornish strains among its ancestors). At 2 Ibs. it is a broiler; at 3 Ibs. it is a fryer. Above 3 Ibs. a painless, chemical desexing of the cockerels yields roasting capons, sometimes called caponettes, weighing up to 6 Ibs.
Out of the race to produce the best eating bird two leaders emerged: Charles Vantress, 46, with headquarters at Duluth, Ga., who raises about 3,000,000 roosters a year; and Henry Saglio, 47, who raises 15 million hens at Arbor Acres, his farm near Glastonbury, Conn. They sell the chickens to the hatchery men, who use them to breed the chicks, which in turn are sold to the broiler men to raise for the market. Of the nearly 2 billion chickens that are turned out for eating every year, Vantress' roosters sire 75%; Saglio's hens mother about 50% of the total.
Mating by Tabulator. Both Vantress and Saglio approach their work with one goal: to get a bird that will eat the least amount of feed, grow the fastest, dress out to a completely standard bird with a minimum of waste. Thanks chiefly to this breeding, in 20 years the time and feed needed to raise a 3-lb. chicken for market have dropped from 14 weeks and 12 Ibs. of feed to 8½weeks and 6|¾ Ibs. The five-year goal: a 3-lb. chicken in six weeks.
Nothing is allowed to impede the pursuit of perfection. Vantress discards any rooster whose offspring have high combs —a low comb means less slaughterhouse waste. Each half ounce that Vantress raises the dressing-out weight puts $30 million in the pockets of his customers. With an equal devotion to his job, Saglio recently decided that keeping chicken pedigrees in card indexes along with millions of measurement records involved the possibility of missing some choice genetic combinations. Now an IBM machine tabulates information on his birds. Tba machine decides which breeding rooster should go with which breeding hen.
50,000 a Day. To take advantage of such computer-like efficiency requires a high degree of automation and integration by the broiler men who buy the breeding stock. In Gainesville, Ga., Jesse Jewell, Inc. operates what it believes is the largest integrated chicken business in the world (TIME, Jan. 14, 1952). Buying Vantress roosters and hens from a New Hampshire breeder, Jewell hatches the eggs, sends the chicks out to 270 contract farmers in a 55-mile radius. The chicken houses are so thoroughly automated that one farmer can look after two houses, each containing 18,000 chickens. The feeding is entirely automatic: a conveyor belt with cleats dribbles the mash out in front of the chickens. About all the farmer must do is see that no thieves or foxes get in.