Chickens are big business in North Carolina, ranked fourth in the production of broilers in the nation. But it's a business that can be hell on the farmers who too often bear heavy risks, and more government regulations are needed to protect them.

"There's no cop on the beat for poultry growers," Steve Etka, the legislative coordinator for the Campaign for Contract Agriculture Reform, told the Journal's Monte Mitchell.

Some farmers, including ones in "chicken-belt" counties such as Wilkes, swear by raising broilers or raising chickens for eggs as an excellent supplement to other farm income. But, as Mitchell's two-day series called "Plucking the Farmer" made painfully clear this week, other farmers get beaten up by this system in which a relative handful of large chicken production companies call the shots. The companies own the chickens, control what kind of birds the farmers get, control the feed, control the pay system and can cancel a contract at almost any time. The farmers take out loans to build the chicken houses they own, but the companies often ask for expensive improvements such as new fans, scale systems, egg-collector conveyors, lights and other equipment. Companies pit farmers against one another through a "tournament system" that quickly weans out poor producers.

For some farmers, such as 60-year-old Lee Mounce of Yadkin County, it's a business that can quickly lead to trouble. When Perdue Farms cut his contract and a bank foreclosed on his chicken-house loans, Mounce paid with his farm and the house he had already paid off. In Chatham County, Jimmy Johnson, who'd been ranked as a poor producer and was worried about losing his contract with Mount-aire Farms of North Carolina, fatally shot himself in one of his chicken houses at the age of 48.

A bill to safeguard farmers through the contract process failed in the state Senate in 2001. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has little authority in cases involving unfair or illegal practices involving contract chicken farmers. And the way the contracts are written gives farmers little recourse in courts.

But a bill introduced last year and now pending before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee would, among other things, give USDA inspectors the same administrative enforcement authority over chicken that it has over red-meat industries. And the Fair Contracts for Growers Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate last year, would preserve access to the court system for poultry farmers. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina is a co-sponsor of this bill, which has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Legislators ought to pass both these important bills. Federal legislation is also needed that would prohibit chicken companies from capriciously canceling contracts without the farmer having the right to recapture capital investment.

Farmers enter the poultry industry of their own volition. But, especially in a time when their options are increasingly limited, they deserve all the fair chances they can get.