Butchers and meat markets that sell meat from locally raised animals is what this looks like.

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?

I don't know anything about the chicken farming business, but I imagine if there was a simple straight-forward solution for the farmers to escape the stranglehold ("just build your own packaging plant and hose it down couple times per day") then the farmers would have already done it (or rather the situation wouldn't have occurred in the first place).

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.

Cool, bro. I look forward to your wildly successful independent chicken farming business that grows so fast it acquihires all its competitors, since it's so easy and all