the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
The part of the supply chain acting as a "monopoly" is too simple to replace. Someone can literally set up a new local butchery, buy directly from the farmers and the exclusive dealership network is broken. Probably need some know-how and a refrigerated truck. It is barely possible that the sort of monopoly structure being described could have been built over the entirety of the US without regulatory support. It'd require something approaching a mind control ray to keep the competition under control.
I believe the other comment saying that chickens are a bad business, competition would tear through the margins like a rooster eating a mouse. But a country wide monopsony on chicken purchases is absurd (unless the regulators are pushing it). If nothing else there are a bunch of low-income people who'd be happy to buy and butcher their own chickens if it cut out a middle man. It isn't feasible to build a natural monopoly.
If you have a market with low margin and no differentiation between the offered stock, the gains are in size and it logically leads to a few players in the market so I doubt that the independent butchery has to be butchered and won't die of natural causes due to high costs or because a few of its partners are having a bad year.
I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem - processing your own birds is safely is definitely possible, but what is required to process them for sale makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that’s just not viable.
The reason regulators made it illegal is basic food safety. A meat packing facility - whether that’s an industrial plant or a small group of farmers in a commercial kitchen or whatever - is a hot and humid environment that is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Now that’s going to happen anyway, but the public safety goal here is to minimize the bacterial load that transfers to the meat so that by the time it reaches the kitchen, the pathogens haven’t reached dangerous levels. That means an entire facility that’s designed to be sprayed down with a foaming disinfectant from wall to wall and crevice to crevice. Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat.
Before refrigeration, people ate meat right after slaughter or cured it. They grew the animals at so low an intensity that >80% of the population were sustenance farmers that lived a precarious life prone to starvation at any time. It just makes no sense to compare the infrastructure to feed hundreds of millions in a single country to small scale pre-industrial agriculture.
We're talking about farmers here. Having to do something a couple of times a day is not going to intimidate them. In an extreme case they'd hire someone and promote them to chief sprayer. These aren't challenges of the magnitude needed to get natural monopolies to form - they're standard style challenges for running a business in an industrial sector. Challenges that farm owners are quite acutely aware of.
If there are monopolies in the US chicken supply chain it is probably just everyday regulatory capture.
I don't say this to despair but to argue that we'd need more details before we can make recommendations how to fix things. Also, there is an obvious power imbalance here, but then it's important to identity the source of that power, so you can address the imbalance.
The post above yours talked about this:
> "Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat."
It absolutely does happen. It's at small scale with higher relative costs, so it's only profitable as a specialty product. It can't compete with industrially farmed meat on price. This would be the range of the farmer who doesn't mind doing some things a few times a day and perhaps hires a helper.
Growing beyond the small scale requires the capital to build facilities and hire staff to run them while you're getting the operation going. You might need to be cutthroat on price to be competitive with existing players, so your revenue might not be great for a long while.
How much output do you think a farmer and a helper are capable of, versus a fully staffed modern industrial poultry farm?
Given that, it's a market in dire need of governments messing with it. The current situation is really bad.
One word: “Distribution.” (The Graduate reference).
Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical goods. You can’t sell something, if you can’t get it to market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a dark art.
That’s one reason that the Internet has upended so many industries. It’s democratized distribution of digital goods, and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes, because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and promotion are the new Distribution. You can’t sell your apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
But we can start with the massive capital requirements of being a logistics provider. It's not something that many farmers, shopkeepers, or even medium-sized businesses could manage.
Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers.
I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.