\n<\/p>\n
As Jill Trapp steered her pickup truck down the red dirt roads of southeast Oklahoma, she raised a hand to greet a passing neighbor \u2014 a calf roper who once made it to the National Finals Rodeo.<\/p>\n
She drove on, passing a modest cowboy church where Sunday sermons share space with country music and the smell of brisket.<\/p>\n
Then, rising among the cedar and elm trees, came a familiar and unwelcome sight: a row of long, gray, windowless chicken houses, each longer than two football fields.<\/p>\n
\u201cI try not to dwell on it. I pretend they\u2019re not here,\u201d Trapp said.<\/p>\n
But soon her truck jolted as it rolled through a pothole \u2014 one of many left behind by the constant flow of semitrucks hauling hundreds of thousands of chickens through the area.<\/p>\n
In this corner of the state, the poultry industry is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n
Within a roughly 25-mile radius of the southeast Oklahoma town of Idabel, there are 59 industrial poultry farms \u2014 more than half built in the last 15 years, typically larger than older operations. Together, they raise nearly 7.4 million birds at maximum capacity. All but six grow chickens for Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in the country; the other six farms supply Pilgrim\u2019s Pride, a Colorado-based, multinational food company.<\/p>\n