Readers may recall our piece early last year on the role of English chicken farmer Antony Fisher in instigating and inspiring this work, carried out today by a welter of organizations at the international, regional and national levels.

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Lawyers for Perdue, which owned the chickens, and the Hudson family said chicken manure wasn't getting out in great enough amounts to pollute, and farmer Alan Hudson testified that he took steps to avoid pollution and to keep the manure in chicken houses.

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"Both men took off running and then they realized they each thought the other was the farmer, but they were both there to steal a chicken, " van Hylckama Vlieg said.

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For all three the arrangement is like the one that governs chicken production in the U.S., with a giant corporation supplying inputs to a small farmer and then picking up the output at harvest time.

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