FAIRMONT, N.C.—Craig Watts unlocked a small room made of plywood, flipped on the lights and tapped the photos he had taped to the fuse box.

Tap, tap, tap. One for every child.

Watts, a contract farmer for the poultry giant Perdue Farms, swung open a second door to the barn, where a deafening choir of 30,000 chicks stirred and chirped. He opened a chute for the feed to enter the pans. Because the birds were packed so tightly, they scrambled over one another to reach it.

Watts surveyed the flock. He was paid only for the healthy chicks who, over six weeks, would grow to the ideal weight of 4.25 pounds. Perdue would pick up those perfect chickens, stuff them into cages and truck them to the slaughterhouse.

The sick ones, the weak ones, the small ones who refused to grow, Watts would have to hold their feet and twist their necks.

This was in the mid-2000s. Watts didn’t particularly enjoy raising chickens for Perdue. But like the five generations before him, he was, at his core, a farmer. He had earned a business degree but chafed at the straitjacket of a suit. He felt trapped by the confines of an office.

That’s why Watts tapped the photos of his children. It raised his spirits. He was doing this work for them.

Watts is now nearly 60 years old, sturdy, with dark eyes, a beard and hair that over time has faded from black to gray. He lives with his wife, Amelia, in a house built by his great grandfather, who is buried in a family cemetery in the back field, where his farm kisses the South Carolina border.

Watts has been profiled in documentaries, newspapers and magazines. Farm Aid honored him with a “Spirit of Farm Aid” award in 2022.

He is the director of the Contract Grower Transition program for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. The group recently launched Growers Unite, a national organization that educates potential farmers about the risks of factory farming and helps existing ones who are facing unfair business practices.

Yet much of his fight against Perdue—which reported $9.8 billion in gross revenue in 2025—and the poultry industry writ large has quietly played out in courtrooms. Since 2014, attorneys have argued before federal judges and agencies whether Watts and Rudy Howell, another North Carolina grower for Perdue, are contract workers or full-fledged company employees.

The distinction isn’t merely semantical. As employees, Watts and Howell would be protected against numerous corporate actions, including retaliation. In the latest development in a long-running whistleblower complaint they filed against Perdue before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they’re asking a federal court to force the company to pay them wages they would have earned had the company not allegedly retaliated against them.

Perdue has repeatedly denied the allegations in court. A company spokesperson told Inside Climate News that Perdue “values our relationship with all of the family farmers in our network, and our goal is always to work with farmers to help them raise healthy, high-quality chickens according to Perdue’s animal welfare, biosecurity, and animal nutrition standards.”

In a separate but related development, the balance of power recently tipped in favor of the poultry companies. On March 19, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed to delay an industry-wide rule that chicken farmers say would have protected them.

The poultry tournament payment system rule, finalized in the last days of the Biden administration, aimed to correct longstanding inequities between farmers and large poultry companies, like Perdue, Tyson Foods, Wayne-Sanderson Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride and Mountaire Farms.

It would prohibit inequitable payment practices that pitted vulnerable chicken farmers against one another. The rule also would force the companies to provide more information to the farmers when requiring them to pay for equipment and housing upgrades.

It was scheduled to go into effect July 1. Now the USDA could postpone its implementation until December 2027. The delay would perpetuate the current system, which often leaves farmers in significant debt due to predatory contracts, according to the watchdog group the Government Accountability Project.

A USDA spokesperson told Inside Climate News the delay will allow the agency to “thoroughly consider its options.”

Perdue farmers support the tournament system, said company CEO Kevin McAdams, according to an article in WATTPoultry, a trade publication.

A Perdue spokesperson told Inside Climate News the company “has positive, productive relationships with the 1,800 poultry farmers who raise our flocks.” Perdue has established Farmer Advisory Councils to “further strengthen these relationships.”

Watts compared the cutthroat tournament payment system to the movie “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” Its theme: Two men enter. One leaves.

“A David and Goliath Story”

The newspaper ad sounded enticing: “We need a few smart birds to raise our birds.”

Watts was smart. He had a college degree and knew farming. It was 1991 and he’d been out of school a few years. How tough could it be to raise chickens?

His wife, Amelia, just 21 at the time, warned him against it. The investment, the debt—they’ll tie you down, she said.

But Watts’ desire to return to the farm was so strong that he ignored what he later saw as red flags in the Perdue contract: He would build the barns, dispose of the waste, incur the debt. Perdue would pay him per live bird. The company could cancel the agreement with 90 days’ notice, for any reason.

Watts borrowed $400,000 to build four 20,000-square-foot barns, court documents show. Initially, the arrangement seemed to work. But over time, Watts felt the deal became more one-sided. Six or seven years in, the company might require farmers to install new expensive equipment, Watts said. “So you go back to the bank. And now you have two mortgages you can’t afford instead of just one.”

Watts spent another $600,000 on farm improvements, at the direction of Perdue, court filings show.

He also lost money, he said, because the chicks got sick: Bacterial infections contracted in the yolk sac. Dermatitis. Cellulitis. Laryngotracheitis, in which the chickens choked on their own blood. Medicines lost their efficacy. The chicks grew so fast they sometimes suffered heart attacks.

“It was very common to see them flip over and die,” Watts said.

A live chicken belonged to Perdue. Watts owned the dead ones.

“They have selectively bred the chicken for breast meat,” Watts said. “They look like two toothpicks sticking out of a grape, and so their legs get to the point they can’t really hold themselves up. There’s no quality of life here. It’s about getting that bird as fat as they can, quick as they can.”

In 2014, Watts called a film crew from Compassion in World Farming. For five years he had been telling Perdue about his concerns, but officials there just ignored it, he said. He also wanted to expose how the big poultry companies ensnared farmers in debt and cornered them when they challenged the system.

“You can control a person two ways,” Watts said, “by debt or a sword. Sometimes the sword is looking pretty good because it’s quick and painless. It makes you do stuff that you probably normally wouldn’t do.”

“It was very common to see them flip over and die.”

— Craig Watts, former poultry farmer

After the film was released in 2014, Perdue sent him a letter. Initially, Watts said, the company complimented him on his productivity and commitment to the company. Then the hammer fell. “We were shocked and surprised that you’re dissatisfied as a producer and what we saw on your farm,” the letter said.

Nothing in Watts’ contract prohibited him from disparaging the company, he said, but soon several Perdue inspectors descended on the farm and returned about every other day. The company sent in their animal welfare crew, he said, whose members wrote him up for dusty lightbulbs. Perdue, he said, blamed him for the conditions of the chicks.

Perdue put him on a performance improvement plan and required him to undergo additional training before it would deliver more chicks, court documents show.

He alleged the company was retaliating against him for exposing its business practices. In court filings Perdue “vigorously denied” Watts’ claims; the company alleged he disregarded the health of the chicks and violated biosecurity protocols by allowing the film crew on the farm.

The next year, Watts filed a whistleblower complaint with OSHA under the Food Safety Modernization Act. But OSHA, which is under the U.S. Department of Labor, dismissed Watts’ complaint in 2016 after it determined he was not a Perdue employee, but merely a contract grower.

For eight years Watts and his attorneys argued the case, appealing to arcane administrative boards and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Perdue filed legal briefs asserting Watts’ case should fall under the USDA.

Eventually, the Labor Department’s Administrative Review Board heard arguments from the Food and Drug Administration supporting Watts’ position. Live poultry raised on farms qualified as food, the FDA wrote in a legal brief, and so was poultry feed. This placed Watts’ case within the Labor Department.

The board then ruled that Watts qualified as an employee and could seek protections against retaliation.

“That was a huge hurdle,” Watts said. “It kept the case going.”

Perdue appealed. Watts got a hair cut, shaved even, to look professional for the depositions, but they never happened. The company then used a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case to claim in federal court that the Department of Labor and its administrative law office violated Perdue’s constitutional rights to due process.

“They wanted a jury trial,” Watts said. “I was like, ‘Fine, let’s do it. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.’”

On March 9, a federal district court judge dismissed Perdue’s constitutional claims. A company spokesperson said the company is appealing the ruling.

Watts is still awaiting a decision on his back pay.

“Some people call this a David and Goliath story,” Watts said. “I like how that story ends.”

A Clash Over Guardrails

Like other behemoth poultry corporations, Perdue would deliver day-old chicks to Watts, as well as feed and medication. Watts’ job was to grow those chicks as quickly as possible, within the restrictions set by Perdue, to their slaughter weight. The company then paid him per live bird.

But the process, said Steve Etka, policy director for the Campaign for Contract Agriculture Reform, is rigged. The poultry tournament system pits farmer against farmer, with the poultry corporation deciding the winner in advance.

The corporations judge the farmers on their feed conversion ratio, the amount of weight the chicks gained during the six weeks in the barns. Farmers who bulk up their chicks most efficiently—quickly and cheaply—receive more money than those whose chicks lag behind.

“It’s really deceptive, and almost mean.”

— Steve Etka, Campaign for Contract Agriculture Reform

There are myriad reasons farmers and their chicks fail to make the grade, Etka said. The company could pick them up too early, without the full benefit of an extra day or two of feeding. The quality of the feed could vary.

The chicks themselves could have had a rough start, even before they hatched. Chicks born to the oldest and youngest breeder hens are generally weak. Chicks born to hens at their reproductive prime are strong.

The poultry corporations can target outspoken farmers, like Watts, and steer the weak chicks to them. “Then they say, ‘You’re just not a very good grower. We’re going to dock you a few thousand for this flock,’” Etka said.

The corporations then funnel that money to more prolific farmers, who get a bonus, he said: “It’s really deceptive, and almost mean.”

Etka said the Biden-era poultry tournament payment system rule was designed to protect poultry farmers against unfair company practices. Those guardrails, he said, “were so important to poultry farmers.”

The rule would also mandate that poultry corporations disclose why they are requiring farmers to change and replace equipment, the cost of which can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The USDA claims that delaying the rule will allow the corporations to better prepare for a transition. However, the Biden-era USDA announced the rule in January 2025, giving them 18 months to reconfigure the payment system.

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Corporate poultry companies have wielded their influence during both Trump administrations. Mountaire and its CEO, Ronald Cameron, contributed more than $2 million to President Donald Trump’s first campaign, according to federal election documents. In the most recent presidential election, Pilgrim’s Pride, majority-owned by Brazilian meat giant JBS, contributed $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

National Chicken Council President Harrison Kircher said in a prepared statement that the trade association applauded the Trump administration and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins for their “thoughtful review of this Biden-era regulation and for listening to chicken farmers across the country who oppose it.”

The rule would have effectively banned bonuses for the best chicken farmers, Kircher said, and would require companies to pay all farmers the same, regardless of their farming practices.

The Biden-era rule, Kircher went on, “threatened to dismantle an efficient and successful industry model that has worked well for decades and helps keep chicken affordable.”

The National Farmers Union, whose political action committee leans Democratic, issued a statement saying the delay is “a disservice to family farmers who deserve a fair system.”

The conservative American Farm Bureau Federation also criticized the postponement. “Growers have spoken on the need to level the playing field with more transparency surrounding how they are compensated and they believed progress was being made,” the group said in a prepared statement.

“[We] look forward to reminding the administration during the public comment period that farmers come first and poultry companies should not be prioritized over the men and women who work to put food on the table for all of America’s families.”

Empty Barns

Two roosters and three hens scramble around the yard in the sunshine. Watts left the factory farming business in 2016, but he still loves his birds.

“It’s different because now I know all their names,” he said: Henny, Penny, Lucky, Junior and Sister. George Washington, who is weaker than the others, likes to hang out separately in her open-air enclosure.

The family has four goats. After a fifth, Stevie, was born, Watts swaddled him in a blanket and bottle-fed him. He died of a birth defect and is buried on the farm beneath his favorite tree.

Watts refinanced the loan, sold off farm equipment, worked at a Lowe’s garden center and did consulting work with farmers’ rights groups. In 2022, he stood in front of an empty chicken barn and burned the mortgage. They had planned to pay off the loan in 10 years. It took them 30.

“Not many poultry farmers see that document come back, stamped, paid in full,” Watts says. “It’s a debt treadmill, and it’s perpetual. And I always tell people, mine hadn’t stopped, but it had slowed down enough I could jump off and not get hurt.”

The barns have been empty for a decade, except for hay that Watts lets a local farmer store inside. Watts has experimented with growing shiitake mushrooms. There’s not much of a market for those in Robeson County, so he’s switching to collard and broccoli seedlings.

If Watts were younger, he would tear down the barns and start a new business. Instead, he might donate them to the local fire department for training exercises. He stops to consider the idea. Yes, he thinks, it would be a public service to burn them to the ground.