Just a few years in the past, Tyler Whitley was working at a assist line for farmers in monetary misery when a name got here from a person who was elevating poultry.

The caller mentioned he labored around the clock rearing lots of of hundreds of chickens at his manufacturing unit farm every year, but had bother affording a Walmart sheet cake for his daughter’s birthday. The person scraped collectively sufficient for the cake, however couldn’t cowl the barns’ heating invoice. The poultry firm the farmer was contracted with berated him for spending cash on a cake reasonably than the excellent invoice, Mr. Whitley recalled.

“This from a consultant of an organization that makes billions of {dollars},” Mr. Whitley mentioned. “I got here to view manufacturing unit farming as a most cancers on rural America,” he continued. “I hated the way it robbed folks of their humanity and diminished them right down to a quantity, to a widget, to a cog.”