Each of Tennessee’s nearly 2,200 industrial chicken barns produce about 200,000 six-pound birds each year, a process that collectively consumes more than one billion gallons of water across all the barns annually.
The typical Tennessean uses around 30,000 gallons of water per year, costing between $300 to $600 annually depending on where one lives. Everyone pays a local sales tax of at least 2%, and a state rate of 7%, on the water.
But the tax bill on water for chicken barns, which in Tennessee are typically controlled by subcontractors for food giants like Tyson Foods, is zero.
“During our peaks, we would often pull 10,000 gallons of water in a single day,” said Craig Watts, a former contract chicken farmer in North Carolina who now works as a director for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, which organizes against industrial farming. “It’s a lot of water, and those new barns in West Tennessee are bigger than what I ran.”
Tennessee lawmakers have touted the state as one of the lowest-taxed in America, with its lack of income tax and relatively low property and business taxes.
But no company has likely benefited more from sales tax exemptions in Tennessee than FedEx. The company has saved $186 million on jet fuel taxes since 2016 after lawmakers capped its tax bill, gradually lowering the money it paid year after year from $32 million that year to $1 million today.
Lawmakers also created specific exemptions to allow the Memphis-based transport company to avoid paying sales tax on construction materials for its multibillion dollar headquarters expansion, saving it an estimated $21.3 million. This year state lawmakers allowed the company to reclassify its data center for a tax exemption, saving the company an additional approximately $3.3 million annually.
