The United States slaughtered 9.7 billion young chickens in 2025, and almost none of them were ever bought or sold alive. The company that owns the plant also owns the bird, the egg it hatched from and the feed it ate. The farmer who raised it owns the barn. That is what "integrator" means, and it is why chicken works differently from beef and pork on every page of this site.
The scale
USDA's slaughter summary for 2025 counts 9.69 billion young chickens under federal inspection, up 1 percent on 2024, at an average of 6.63 pounds live, for 64 billion pounds of live weight. About 359 plants slaughtered poultry of all kinds under federal inspection, in 40 states for young chickens. Young turkeys, by comparison, were 191 million head.
How integration works
A cattle feeder owns his cattle and sells them to a packer. A hog farmer, more often than not, raises hogs under contract but the packer still buys the animal. In chicken the integrator never buys the bird because it never stops owning it.
The integrator runs the breeder flocks, the hatchery, the feed mill, the trucks and the processing plant. It places day-old chicks with a contract grower, delivers the feed and the veterinary care, and collects the birds about six to seven weeks later. The grower supplies the houses, the labor, the utilities and the litter, and is paid per pound of live bird, with the rate set by how that flock performed against the other growers settled the same week. USDA's Economic Research Service put 97 percent of broilers on contract operations in its last full survey, on 2011 data, and the share has not been reported lower since.
Tyson's own filing says corn, soybean meal and other feed were about 53 percent of the cost of growing a live chicken in fiscal 2025, and that it contracts mainly with independent farmers to raise its birds. Pilgrim's describes a global network of about 4,500 growers, 36 feed mills, 50 hatcheries and 39 processing plants.
Who owns the integrators
USDA counts birds and plants, not companies. The names come from the companies and the trade press.
Tyson Foods is the largest and is publicly listed in New York. Chicken brought in about $16.8 billion of its fiscal 2025 sales.
Pilgrim's Pride is 82.28 percent owned by JBS S.A. of Brazil, the same parent as the beef and pork packers in the sibling articles. In August 2026 JBS proposed to buy the 18 percent it does not own, in JBS shares worth about $28.49 a Pilgrim's share, roughly $1.2 billion, after dropping a cash offer the year before.
Wayne-Sanderson Farms was formed in July 2022 when Cargill and Continental Grain paid $4.53 billion, $203 a share, for Sanderson Farms and merged it with Wayne Farms. Cargill is a beef Big Four packer; Continental Grain is a private investment company.
Perdue Farms, Koch Foods and Mountaire Farms are privately held, Perdue by the Perdue family. Foster Farms, the big West Coast integrator, was bought by Atlas Holdings, a private equity firm, in June 2022. The next tier in the trade press lists is Peco Foods, George's, House of Raeford and Amick Farms.
So the two largest are a listed US company and a Brazilian-controlled one, the third is owned by a beef packer and a private investor, and the rest are family or private equity. There is no co-op and no farmer-owned plant of any size, which is the opposite of pork, where three large plants belong to the farmers who supply them.
How concentrated it is
The last public ranking with volumes, WATT PoultryUSA's count of 2015 production, had the five largest companies at about 60 percent of US ready-to-cook chicken, about 493 million pounds a week between them, with Tyson alone at 176 million pounds a week. Two of those five have since merged into Wayne-Sanderson, so the top four today hold what five held then. The ranking is now behind a paywall, so this article does not print a 2025 share it cannot source.
That is less concentrated than beef at the company level and far less concentrated at the plant level than pork, where 15 plants kill two thirds of the hogs. Chicken has hundreds of plants because the bird is small and the plants sit next to the growers, across the South from Delmarva to Texas.
Why it matters for a chicken buyer
There is no live market to read. Cattle and hogs have a cash price that moves every day and tells you what the packer is paying. Chicken has none, because nothing is for sale until it is a case of parts. The only public prices are USDA's weekly whole-bird composite and the parts prints, which is why the chicken pages on this site start there and the national chicken report article explains how to read them.
Supply is decided months ahead, by the integrators. The weekly hatchery report, eggs set and chicks placed, is the earliest public signal of what will be in the plants nine weeks later. By the time a wing or breast print moves, the birds behind it were placed in September.
A plant going dark matters less than in beef or pork. With hundreds of plants and birds that can be shifted between them inside a company, one outage rarely moves the national print. What moves chicken is disease in the breeder flocks, feed cost, and an integrator's decision to cut or add placements.