Description: Gisolfi shows how the poultry farming model of semivertical integration perfected a number of practices that had first underpinned the cotton-growing crop-lien system, ultimately transforming the poultry industry in ways that drove tens of thousands of farmers off the land and rendered those who remained dependent on large agribusiness firms.
Brief description: MONICA R. GISOLFI is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Review Quotes: The Takeover tells us the story of a revolutionary transformation in agriculture's business model that drove tens of thousands of farmers off the land and rendered others dependent on large agribusiness firms. It is a complicated story, and Gisolfi tells it well. She has meticulously combed USDA files, congressional records, and poultry publications to reconstruct the protracted and convoluted transformation of the poultry business. A real strength of the work is her use of archived oral history interviews with poultry growers to put a human face on what, in the hands of another writer, would essentially be a business and institutional history. The Takeover offers poignant testimony of how independent landowners became, in essence, sharecroppers and shows the impact of that metamorphosis on them and their families.--Melissa Walker "author of Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History"