The Takeover by Monica R Gisolfi

The Takeover by Monica R Gisolfi

Following a trajectory from Reconstruction to the present day, Monica Gisolfi shows how the Georgia poultry farming model of semivertical integration perfected a number of practices that had first underpinned the cotton-growing crop-lien system, ultimately transforming the poultry industry.

The Takeover tells us the story of a revolutionary transformation in agriculture’s business model that drove tens of thousands of farmers off the land and rendered others dependent on large agribusiness firmsIt is a complicated story, and Gisolfi tells it well. She has meticulously combed USDA files, congressional records, and poultry publications to reconstruct the protracted and convoluted transformation of the poultry business. A real strength of the work is her use of archived oral history interviews with poultry growers to put a human face on what, in the hands of another writer, would essentially be a business and institutional history. The Takeover offers poignant testimony of how independent landowners became, in essence, sharecroppers and shows the impact of that metamorphosis on them and their families.

-- Melissa Walker * author of Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History *

How did the modern poultry industry emerge from a region of cotton farms? What business model can explain why aspiring farmers ended up as powerless, as processed, and as exploited as their chickens? The Takeover deftly examines the agricultural and social history of Upcountry Georgia and reveals the matrix of contract growing, government subsidy, and rural impoverishment that enriched agribusiness integrators and freed these firms from financial and environmental risk. This is a big story about a small place.

-- Sarah T. Phillips * author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal *

This crucially important book shows ways in which today’s chicken farming in North Georgia is essentially an extension of the means of production (or should be say “oppression”) found in cotton agribusiness during Reconstruction. It shows how agribusiness retains control and profits while their contract farmers absorb most of the risk. Furthermore, this book illuminates ways that the federal government, through the USDA, has not only enabled this exploitative system, but also subsidized it.

* Appalachian Mountain Books *

MONICA R. GISOLFI is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820335780
ISBN 10	0820335789
Title	The Takeover
Author	Monica R Gisolfi
Series	Environmental History And The American South
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	2017-04-15
Number of pages	124
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.