You know how sometimes you get into a high-stakes conversation and you think of the perfect things to say after it’s over? Well, here’s a factoid I wish I had dropped during last week’s interview with Terry Gross on her NPR show Fresh Air: ‘The number of chickens produced annually in the United States has increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1950 while the number of farms producing those birds has dropped by 98 percent.’

Those startling numbers and many more appear in a new report from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry, an alliance that includes pastured-based poultry farms, chefs, the Sierra Club, and an environmental law firm called GreenLaw. (Hat tip to the excellent Maryn McKenna.) The report reads like the black book of industrial chicken farming-a kind of dossier of the ills of rounding up billions (yes, billions) of birds into tight spaces and fattening them as quickly as possible.

It’s easy to understand why some Georgians might come together to promote alternative forms of chicken production. The poultry industry has alighted upon Georgia in a way it hasn’t any other individual state. According to the report, which is lavishly footnoted and was prepared with the […]