 These big producers are the unseen giants of industrial farming. If you want to know who controls the shape, size and operational style of the chicken industry, it's the big producers you want to look at. But how did it get to be this way? How did the power drift away from farmers like Charles or Cecile Steele and into the hands of these larger firms? Chicken historian and hater Emlyn Rood knows the history of this too. And it starts, again in the USA, in the aftermath of the Great Depression.