The Broiler Revolution, How Delaware Fed the Chicken to the World

In nineteen twenty-three, a farmwoman named Cecile Steele living near Ocean View in Sussex County, Delaware, ordered fifty chicks from a hatchery. The hatchery made a mistake and sent five hundred. Rather than send them back, Steele decided to raise all five hundred for meat rather than for eggs, as was the custom at the time. She sold the surviving birds at sixty-two cents a pound and turned a profit. By nineteen twenty-six she was raising ten thousand a year. Without fully intending to, Cecile Steele had just invented the American broiler chicken industry.

Within a decade, the Delmarva Peninsula, the long peninsula shared by Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, had become the center of commercial broiler production in the United States. By nineteen thirty-five, Delaware alone was producing more than five million broilers annually. By mid-century the number was in the hundreds of millions.

The industry transformed the economics of Delaware's lower counties. Tenant farmers who had struggled to make a living on shallow, sandy coastal plain soils found a reliable cash crop in broiler chickens. Poultry companies provided the chicks, the feed, and the veterinary guidance. Farmers provided the land and the labor. The arrangement, called the contract growing system, spread from Delaware across the country and eventually around the world. Today it is the dominant business model for nearly all commercial chicken production on earth.

Delaware still produces hundreds of millions of broilers per year, concentrated in Sussex County, the southernmost third of the state. Drive through lower Delaware in almost any direction and you will see the long white chicken houses, windowless and ventilated, lined up in fields between stands of loblolly pine. They are the direct descendants of the improvised chicken house Cecile Steele built on her farm a century ago, when a shipping error changed what Americans eat for dinner.