Between 1960 and 1995, U.S. broiler production grew by 5.6 percent per year, but a lack of growth since 2008 has placed new financial pressures on contract growers. This report uses USDA survey data to delineate the key features of the industry’s organization and to analyze its recent financial and productive performance.

Poultry has for many centuries supplied a large proportion of the food of civilized man, and in almost every country of the world the poultry industry is an important branch of agriculture. According to the returns of the census for 1900, the total number of chickens, including guinea fowls, on farms in the United States was 233,598,085; the total…