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The book whose tires I've been pumping on here recently, The End of Food, is certainly unkind to the chicken industry, but it lays the price pressures squarely at the feet of food retailers, mainly Wal-Mart and Kroger in the US. According to that book, the retailers squeeze the suppliers to the point where each processing facility has to produce over a million chickens a week just to break even (if I remember right, he put the number at about 1.25M in 2009). The producers have no choice but to squeeze the farmers in turn. It's a vicious cycle that has to reach a breaking point some time. Buy free range chicken!