“The farm is not a real family farm, but a cog in this larger industrial-agriculture model,” said Joe Maxwell, a fourth-generation farmer and the executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets. “This is a heavily concentrated marketplace with a vertically integrated model. That denies the consumer an independent market, and it extracts wealth from the independent farmer.”

The paper has caused controversy and concern in the poultry world, with farmers worried that Uncle Sam might withdraw financial aid, members of Congress looking into lending practices, and poultry businesses pushing back against the government findings. There are broader ramifications, too. In sectors across the economy, from defense contracting to pizza delivery, a handful of firms have amassed and are exerting similar kinds of market power. Economists and policy experts believe that Goliath controlling, contracting, and acquiring David is a key factor driving the country’s anemic growth rates, sluggish productivity numbers, and stark income inequality.

The Sunday roast chicken on your dining table might have come not from an independent grower, but from a zombie arm of a giant corporation. That chicken-salad sandwich in your lunch bag might have come from an agribusiness leeching taxpayer support for small farms. And that bucket of spicy fried might contain within it a lesson about why your paycheck is so small.

Between the retraction of labor law and the decline of antitrust enforcement, “you’ve got a regulatory black hole in which a powerful company can exert total control with no responsibility,” said Marshall Steinbaum, the research director at the Roosevelt Institute. “Between the Amazons of the world and the Ubers of the world and the chicken farmers, when you step back and look at it, you think, ‘Oh wow, this is not an isolated thing. This is actually a big thing.’”

Much of the chicken that ends up on your plate comes from one of a handful of big businesses, such as Tyson and Perdue. The big company provides the chicks. The contract farmer raises them into chickens. The big company slaughters them for meat. It packages and brands that meat under one of dozens of labels. And it sells it cheap to the American consumer.

The issue, the Small Business Administration report found, is the level of control that the integrated poultry company exerts over the farmer. These big operations do not act like department stores, choosing goods from a broad variety of vendors and fostering competition and innovation. They instead act like a lord with serfs, or a landowner with sharecroppers.

The big chicken producers argue against that characterization. “The situation is no different than any other small business that enters into a contractual relationship to provide services to a larger company,” said Tom Super of the National Chicken Council, a trade group, in an email. “These loans, approved by the federal government, go directly to small, independent family farms in rural America which has allowed people to start their own businesses, expand or diversify their farm operations, create jobs, and stay and work on their farms with their families. If anything, the government should be doing more, not less, to drive growth and opportunity in the rural economies that feed America and the world.”