“It’s been very telling to me how bothered consumers are when they learn how this industry really operates,” Leonard told Salon.

“The Meat Racket,” Leonard’s new exposé, lays it all out on the chopping board: how virtually all of our meat is produced by the same four companies, led by Tyson, how those companies manage to keep the farmers who raise their chickens under crippling debt while ensuring that poultry prices stay high, and how the only real choice left for the consumer is to either partake or opt out of meat altogether.

Leonard spoke with Salon about how he brought these heavily guarded secrets to light, and explained why those who would defend the industry are apologists for a system gone wildly awry. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First, could you tell us a little bit about your relationship to the meat industry? How were you able to get this inside view of what’s going on in Tyson’s boardrooms? 

I’ve been a business reporter in the Midwest for about 10 years. I covered agribusiness for the Associated Press, and before that, I worked at smaller newspapers. And in that role, I kept kind of bumping up against the industrial meat system. I wrote my first story about Tyson foods in 1999 for a newspaper, and the more I encountered this system, the more I became fascinated with it. It’s a remarkable experience to walk into one of these giant factory farms and see 75,000 chickens on the ground in front of you.

But the seeds for this book really came in 2004, when I went down to this little town of Waldron, Arkansas, to report on chicken farmers down there. And I was just absolutely stunned by just how much power Tyson had over these farmers, and how powerful it was in this little town. And I wanted to find out how we got to this point, where these companies can act like virtual dictators in these towns where they operate, where they have regional monopolies. And I wanted to also understand how this system really works from the inside.

So, I just spent a lot of time trying to get people inside the company to talk to me and share their stories, so I could understand how things really work, and why the company behaves as it does. And that effort was really helped in 2008, frankly, when I just randomly ran into Don Tyson at a restaurant, and he agreed to talk to me about this, and his career and how he built the company.

We did a couple of on-the-record interviews, and it was really invaluable to me, to help understand why the company operates how it does, and how history shaped it, and how Don Tyson himself kind of shaped it.

I wonder why he agreed to talk to you. You call the industry a racket, and in the book you describe how it’s really taken over the food system. Is that something that Don Tyson was aware of?  Or did he just have an entirely different way of seeing it?

Unfortunately he passed away in 2011, so I was never able to go back to him with the final book and talk about it. He was definitely proud of the relationship Tyson built with the farmers, for example. But there were just a lot of realities on the ground that were really disturbing — I mean, there’s a mountain of evidence in civil lawsuits, federal investigations that show the abuses that happen with farmers.

Maybe part of it is that when an organization is so big, the people at the middle can be removed from the effects of how the company operates. Reporting on the actual ground, you see things as they really play out, and so that’s how the reporting led to the conclusion of the book, which is that just a few companies have incredible control over the market. They have the ability to virtually dictate the price they pay for chicken to chicken farmers now. And part of that’s due to the fact that there’s really very little competition in the business anymore.

One of the things in the book that really surprised me was how Don Tyson kind of pushed chicken on McDonalds — he thought this was a good idea before they did. How much of the current state of the food industry is Tyson itself directly responsible for, and to what extent is it just taking advantage of the way things are?

It’s absolutely mixed. Tyson Foods is a pioneer of the current model of industrial meat production. The company didn’t invent contract farming or vertical integration on its own, but it borrowed these techniques that other companies were using in the South, especially back in the 1960s. But what Tyson did was it perfected this model, it took this model and ran with it, and expanded more aggressively than any of its competitors.

By the 1990s, Tyson Foods was the world’s biggest chicken company. And then, all the other meat companies had to compete with Tyson and basically imitate the company to keep up with it, and to keep up with its growth. So Tyson borrowed, and was very smart about borrowing practices from other firms, but it certainly pressed ahead in a really aggressive way and transformed the industry around it. One of the things I saw clearly was that even people that didn’t make chicken — the companies in the pork business and cattle business — had to compete with Tyson. Because the company started making chicken so much cheaper that it was hurting their sales, and hurting their bottom line, so it forced them to react, and to start imitating the company just to stay in business.

By now, you write, “American consumers are using their money to support a system that keeps farmers in a state of indebted servitude.” Is it possible at all to avoid this, or is it so overwhelming at this point that there’s no real way to get around that system?

I mean there’s obviously the option to go vegetarian, but if you eat meat, as I do, the only way to truly opt out of this system is to buy your meat directly from a farmer or livestock producer. And there’s actually a pretty vigorous market for that at local farmer’s markets. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial energy in rural America with these people who are raising cattle and chickens and hogs on their own, and doing it in a different way, and selling directly to the consumer. So that’s one way to opt out completely.

But it’s pretty impractical, I think, to ask consumers to buy all of their meat from the local farmer’s market.

It’s hard to do when you’re trying to support a family, in terms of time and money. When you walk into the grocery store or a restaurant, it is virtually impossible to boycott these meat companies, the big four that dominate the industry today: Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield.

You can walk into the meat section and see a wide variety of brand names, but they virtually all trace back to these four companies. And that’s one of the big points of the book: there’s not competition, viable and vigorous competition in the meat industry anymore. These firms have locked up the market. So trying to boycott them is really fruitless, especially considering the fact that they make so much unbranded product: rotisserie chicken, restaurant meat, things that don’t even carry their brand name. So they’re virtually impossible to boycott at the grocery store or the restaurant.

And what about the farmers themselves? If there is this opportunity, a market for other ways of raising animals, and they’re being driven into debt and losing their farms because of the way the meat industry is treating them, why aren’t they pursuing those other options?

The situation is absolutely the worst in rural America, in terms of competition. You can cite these facts of how consolidated the market is. For example, three companies make almost half of the chicken in the United States, four companies make 85 percent of the beef. But when you get down to the local level of any town in rural America that produces meat, and where livestock production is still a pillar of the economy, you see that these companies operate as regional monopolies.

They’ve consolidated the business to such an extent that a feedlot owner in Nebraska, for example, or a chicken farmer in Arkansas, will often have no viable choice of who they can do business with. You can have contract farmers in Arkansas, some of the towns I visited, that if they’re lucky, they might be able to have two chicken companies that they could sign a contract with. But when you only have two options of who to do business with, those two companies don’t have to compete with each other in terms of contract layout or how much they pay you. And so I saw time and again, farmers do not have a real choice when they’re facing bad practices or they’re being underpaid; they simply don’t have another party that they can go to, that they can do business with.