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When the birds reach market weight, Jewell sends a truck to get them—and to deliver more baby birds. At his processing plant in Gainesville it takes only 60 minutes to bleed, scald, pluck and eviscerate, separate the birds into parts. Once separated into bins, the parts are put back together, without regard to which bird they came from originally, to make a package of standard weight. He processes 50,000 birds a day, has his own trucks distributing them all over the South and the Midwest, and as far as San Francisco, from where many are shipped frozen to Honolulu.
Showers for Pigs. The indoor life cycle of the chickens forecasts the future, for all farm animals. Purdue University has a $700,000 climate-control program in which, among other things, pigs take regular shower baths. Says Animal Science Professor Frederick N. Andrews: "Pigs do not wallow in mud because they like to be dirty. They wallow in mud because they have no sweat glands to keep them cool." With daily or even hourly shower baths, meticulous regulation of the temperature, humidity and even the air movement around them for each day of their lives, Purdue's hogs grow on less feed, gain 1¾ Ibs. per day, compared to 1½ Ibs. for hogs forced to put up with natural weather.
Purdue has also brought sheep indoors.
Not only do the sheep seem to be happier but Purdue can regulate the amount of light they get. Normally, sheep breed only once a year, when the autumn days begin to shorten. By changing the lighting indoors, Purdue can make sheep think it is autumn any time of the year, get two or more lamb crops, schedule spring lamb around the calendar.
Cradle to Grave. U.S. manufacturers are turning out fully automated cages designed with the idea of giving each animal precision comfort.
Ranger Equipment Co. is on the market with the Porkliner, claims that with $112,000 worth of its equipment one man can raise 7,000 hogs a year with only half-day help. The Pork-liner is a hog's country club. The little pigs begin with private rooms, to avoid being stepped on by the sow. A hydraulic lift is used to stack the cages six rows high. Manure falls through the cage bottoms and is mechanically removed to be used as fertilizer. In their whole lives, until they are made into ham, sausages and bacon, the hogs never know weight-killing struggle.
Such confinement and automation of animals is possible and profitable because of a raft of new chemical discoveries. In 1948 Purdue's Dr. Andrews discovered how to put tiny pellets of stilbestrol, a synthetic female sex hormone, under the skins of cattle and sheep to make them gain weight 15% faster. Today 80% of the nation's beef cattle get stilbestrol. This helps farmers produce an estimated billion pounds more meat than they could have got for the same amount of feed without stilbestrol.