On Monday, September 8th, Georgie Cortanza came to our class to give a guest lecture. The Saturday before, our class had visited her poultry farm to learn a bit more about the organic poultry industry. She came to our class to give a more in depth lecture about the organic poultry industry. She went over the history of the poultry industry. In 1862 the Morrell Act was formed to establish land grant colleges. In the 1850s railroads were built in Delmarva to transport crops and animals around the northern east coast, and in 1916, the Dupont highway was built to make it even easier to transport goods. 

In Delmarva, there are 3 states, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, made up of 3 counties in Delaware, 8 in Maryland, and 1 in Virginia. There are 9,000,000,000 chickens produced in the US each year, and 825,000,000 of those are produced in Delmarva. That’s a lot of chicken. Georgie also talked about how many processing plants there are in Delmarva and how Perdue was the first family to ever brand their chicken. Now all we see in grocery stores is branded chicken. Georgie emphasized that when you have opinions, you should always look deeper into why you have those opinions and you should keep an open mind to other opinions.