The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business

by Christopher Leonard

  After counting the dead, Brown would sometimes walk through the barn, looking over the downy white floor of birds with practiced eyes. The chickens seemed as delicate as a crop of indoor snow being grown in the Ozark summer. With just the slightest glitch, a broken fan or feed line or dirty water tank, the birds would expire fast as melting ice. More than anything, he thought, it took vigilance to raise chickens. This is what he preached to farmers. This was his solution when he entered a barn and saw that the feeder was broken and the birds were pecking each other to death. Vigilance, above all.

  In many cases, that is about all the farmers could offer: attention. Most didn’t know a thing about the business when they got into it. They borrowed the money to build or buy the houses and entered a contract with a huge corporation that could cut them off at any moment, all without ever having even fed a single chicken in their lives. They did it to hold on to a way of life, most of them, to stay in the countryside where they were born and make a living that paid slightly more than cutting timber or digging ditches.

  Even Brown didn’t know that much about birds when he became a field veterinarian in the 1970s. He was a truck driver at the time, and his brother worked at the feed mill. He heard the company needed field men, so he applied. He learned everything he knew by following another field man from farm to farm.

  And so he told the farmers what he could: how to arrange fans and keep water lines clean, or how to open the side vents of a barn during certain hours to cool the birds.

  But he also knew what farmers didn’t: that no matter what they did, no matter how many hours they worked or what new equipment they bought or innovations they tried, it wouldn’t affect their profitability at the end of the day. That profitability was determined before the loads of baby chicks were placed on the bed of fresh litter. It depended on how healthy the birds were at birth, and whether Tyson delivered good feed or the dregs from the bottom of the feed mill silos. That was it. Good chicks. Good feed. Good profit. The dice were loaded from the minute the baby chicks and feed were delivered.

  Just before he retired in the early 1990s, Brown attended a meeting that changed Waldron’s economic destiny.

  A memo arrived from Springdale. The field techs were told that the Waldron plant was going to be put to a new use. It was part of a new strategy that the bosses in Springdale were pushing. Each plant would concentrate on making and selling specialty products rather than providing standardized birds for the grocery store. Waldron was going to sell smaller chickens to be used by fast-food restaurants like Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The idea was to sell a three-and-a-half-pound bird rather than a four-and-a-half-pound bird. The chickens would yield smaller breast patties that were ideal for fast-food consumption. The change would be immediate and easy to implement. The field techs would schedule the chickens to get picked up earlier than usual, giving them less time to grow.

  Brown was uncomfortable. He knew that growing smaller birds would mean less money for the farmers, and all of the farmers had fixed mortgages to pay on the chicken houses. The farmers paid a fixed cost to raise each flock, and they needed to sell as many pounds as possible to cover their bills. Cutting down the size of the bird was a pay cut for all of them.

  Brown raised his hand during the meeting.

  — When are we going to tell the farmers about the change? he asked.

  — We’re not going to, he was told.

  The field techs seemed uneasy at the answer.

  — Don’t worry, the manager said, the farmers will figure it out. They’ll notice that you’re there two weeks early to pick up the birds.

  And so the new regime was put into place. The Waldron plant would serve up smaller chickens for fast-food restaurants. Farmers might or might not figure it out, depending on how closely they watched the calendar of their bird deliveries and pickups.

  For farmers around Waldron, it was the beginning of a fifteen-year bleed on their bank accounts. Each flock that was taken away was smaller, and so was the paycheck, if only slightly. But the mortgage payments continued at the same level. So each flock chipped away, payment after payment, at the profit and equity farmers had invested in their farms.

  Brown often visited Jerry Yandell. They didn’t have too many disagreements. Jerry was all right in Brown’s book. Jerry was willing to work hard, he didn’t gripe any more than most. He was willing to try new things and knew the chicken business like someone who had done it his whole life, which, of course, he had. Yandell was willing to put in the seven-day workweek required for chicken farming. Brown chatted with him on the farm and walked with him through the chicken houses. But Brown knew that with each new flock, Yandell was working hard to put himself just one step farther behind.

  * * *

  By December of 2003, Jerry and Kanita Yandell were sinking into a financial hole. The couple was behind on paying their farm loan and gas and electric bills. This was in the middle of raising the second flock of sick birds. Day after day, they hauled loads of chicken carcasses out of the houses and stuffed them into the plastic freezers provided by Tyson. Kanita called Tyson. The field techs came to the farm and emptied the freezers, then they returned a few days later to do it again.

  The Tyson field technicians suggested the Yandells circulate the air more to cool the chicks. So Kanita and Jerry spent three thousand dollars on new industrial fans. They hauled the fans into the houses and stood on ladders and drilled them into the ceiling. The fans roared to life and kept the warm air circulating. The money they borrowed to install them would surely make this flock a loss.

  The birds kept dying. The field men suggested that Jerry turn on the fans on the side of the house to vent the air outside. This was an extraordinary, and seemingly stupid, thing to do in December. The side fans were meant to run in spring and summer to push hot air out of the barns. But the field men said it might help, so Jerry did it. He turned on the side vents and blew out the air he was paying to heat and circulate with new ceiling fans.

  The Yandells’ son Jeremy lived on one of their farm properties with his wife. He spent his days in the houses, helping his parents haul out the dead birds. Kanita and Jeremy wore facemasks and gloves as they walked the long length of the barns, trying to gather the dead birds before the survivors began to pick away at them for food.

  * * *

  Perry Edwards arrived for work before dawn. He drove north from downtown Waldron on a side road that leads to the Tyson plant’s front gate. He arrived when the sky was still dark and the town still sleeping. Edwards drove over a set of railroad tracks and onto a broad parking lot near the base of the towering feed mill. Trains brought loads of grain to the mill, where it was mixed with vitamins and medicine and funneled into a waiting line of Tyson feed trucks that hauled it to farms throughout the countryside. Just beyond the feed mill was the slaughterhouse, a short, broad building with smokestacks that sent up white wisps of steam in the morning. Tyson’s “live haul” trucks came into the gate, their beds piled high with steel crates full of white chickens. These trucks rolled onto metal platforms that recorded the weight of the birds they carried. Then they drove alongside the building where their live cargo was loaded into the slaughtering line inside.

  Edwards had an office job in the complex, where he had a view into the vortex of paperwork that spun between the trucks being loaded with feed and trucks hauling birds to the slaughterhouse.

  This paper trail was critical for the office at the Tyson Plant that was alternately called the Live Grow Division, or simply the Broiler Office. This was the nerve center of the network of farms around Waldron, where the daily functions of an ecosystem of a million growing birds is coordinated. It’s where the flow charts were printed that determined the number of eggs to be hatched in a given week, and where the schedule was written for the trucks to haul new chicks out to farms. It’s where the weight of the birds at slaughter was tallied and scored against the amount of feed delivered to a farm. This office determined the farmer’s pay
ment, based on Tyson’s ranking system.

  During Edwards’s tenure at Tyson, the Broiler Office was run by Gary Roper, an affable Texan who moved to Waldron for the job with Tyson. Roper was not well known in town. He was a young and good-looking man with a trim physique and short brown hair. The farmers knew Roper was in good with the big wheels at Tyson headquarters in Springdale. He had no problem dispatching orders and dismissing complaints. He had a remarkably easy feel for authority. Gary Roper called the shots, but he rarely visited the farmers. There were multiple layers of power between his office and the farms, leagues of field technicians, truck drivers, office clerks, and managers insulating him from people like Jerry Yandell. Roper commanded the fleet of Tyson trucks that perpetually crisscrossed Waldron and surrounding Scott County: the beige pickup trucks with the TYSON emblem on their door that the field techs drove, and the big white feed tankers with TYSON printed on their side that arrived in the middle of the night to refill feed bins. The farmers talked to the men in these trucks and asked that they pass the comments on to Roper.

  Edwards knew the power that Roper had, seemed to know it even better than Roper himself. Edwards had grown up around the chicken industry in Waldron. In the 1970s, the money was good. But by 2000, chicken farmers weren’t getting paid much more than they earned three decades earlier. And the cost of fuel and electricity and all the other necessities had risen so much that there was little or no profit left over for shopping or nice houses. Rather than go into farming, Edwards got a job at the Tyson plant in town. He was making a decent hourly wage, and he had health insurance. Not a fortune maybe, but it was steady.

  When Edwards arrived at the office, trucks were rolling into the plant with live birds and others were leaving empty. Other trucks sat scattered in a parking lot, still heaped with crates of chickens after being weighed and waiting for their turn to unload. Edwards sometimes noticed mistakes on the trucking logs. That was to be expected, considering that about forty or fifty trucks came through the plant during a full shift. Tyson Foods kept track of which farms the trucks had visited so the company could credit the weight of the chickens back to the right farmer. But as Edwards looked through the logs left over from the night shift, he noticed the numbers didn’t always add up. Truck number 549, for example, was recorded in the logs to have delivered chickens from a certain farm just west of town. But a separate log said chickens hadn’t even been picked up yet from that farm, and empty trucks were just now heading there to get a load. That meant that a load of chickens had been weighed and credited to the wrong farm.

  It was a small mistake, but Edwards knew what that kind of error meant to farmers. It meant a farmer had been assigned a completely arbitrary weight for the chickens he just spent six weeks raising, a discrepancy that would directly affect how much he got paid. Correcting the mistake meant calling busy truckers as they sat parked on farms with crews of workers piling crates of squawking birds onto their flatbeds, and asking them to retrace their steps and recite the other farms they visited. Some office workers wouldn’t bother with such corrections because they were too much of a hassle. They would have to correct the weigh-in tickets and fix the logs, even as more trucks rolled in with chickens and others were loaded with feed for delivery, piling up yet more paper on their desk.1 When the mistakes were pointed out to Tyson managers, the response might be just a shrug. To Edwards, it did not seem anyone was too worried about financial damages for the farmers.

  Edwards often answered the phone when farmers called with questions. They called after getting their paychecks and weigh-in receipts, wondering how the average weight of their birds could have possibly been three pounds when the farmer himself had seen the birds were no smaller than three and a half pounds when they were picked up. Farmers like Bill Bethel could hardly control the anger in their voice.

  Bethel was an older farmer who’d been in the business for decades. So he’d seen the industry’s good times come and go. He had too much historical perspective on the business, and he seemed perpetually upset that he hadn’t gotten a pay raise in twenty years, even though Tyson was bigger and more profitable than ever. He quibbled over the weights, and he argued about the volume of feed Tyson claimed to have delivered. He railed on the phone when he was convinced there had been a mistake on his weigh-in ticket. Edwards listened, but he always came to the same conclusion: There was nothing Edwards could do. The scales didn’t lie, he would say. So Bethel would ask him to put a plant manager on the phone; he wanted to talk to someone who could do something about it.

  One afternoon, Edwards heard the dispatchers talking back and forth after a trucker tipped over his load of feed out on a country highway. After hours of cleanup, they managed to get the feed into the trailer and the truck up and running again. But the trucker called to say the feed was filled with gravel and asphalt and dirt from the road. It was a total loss, and it would have been insane to pour the feed into a bin on a farm and expect it to run properly through the automated feed lines into a chicken house. It was even crazier to think birds would eat it. The driver asked what to do and where he should dump it.

  Edwards heard a plant manager give the reply.

  — Send it to Bill Bethel.

  The incident gave Perry Edwards a queasy feeling that stuck with him for years. He knew that what was happening at the Tyson plant wasn’t right.4

  * * *

  Over the years, Edwards made it a habit to look over Tyson’s delivery logs, tracking which baby chicks were delivered to which farms.

  It was an open secret that any Tyson hatchery would produce a certain number of chicks that were unhealthy. As industrialized as the whole farming process had become, that simple fact remained unchanged. Some of the birds were good. Some were bad. And it was clear, almost from the moment they were hatched, which birds were which. Whole batches of yellow chicks rolled off the line at the hatchery and were deemed “culls,” too weak and spindly to ever gain weight at a healthy pace. But even these birds must be delivered to farms because the pace of the machine could never slow. There was never a time-out available to Tyson, when a day’s worth of production could be omitted and the plant shut down because a flock or two of birds was sub-optimal. So the culls went out, the farms stayed full, and the slaughterhouse kept running at full capacity.

  Tyson could roughly predict which chicks would be healthy based on the age of the hens that laid the eggs. Older hens produced weaker chicks, while younger hens laid more vigorous broods. Edwards noticed that some farmers were consistently receiving chicks produced by the healthiest, youngest hens. Whoever was setting up the deliveries in the Broiler Office was giving these farmers the cream off the top. And he noticed something else: Other farmers were consistently getting the batches of culls.

  As Perry Edwards pored over the shipping logs, he saw that the pattern was the same. When there were bad batches of birds, they went to the same group of farms. And the healthiest birds also went to a select group of farms that, not coincidentally, always ranked as the highest paid farms in the network.

  Tyson Foods insists that such accusations are the stuff of “urban myth.” The company says that plant managers cannot determine which baby chicks are likely to be healthy and which are not, because so many chicks are born at each hatchery—875,000 a week in the case of Waldron’s hatchery. But Edwards’s observations seem to be validated by sworn testimony in a 2010 lawsuit. In that case, Tyson Foods employee Geraldine Henson testified to observing what Perry Edwards had seen. Henson had been secretly taped by two Tyson Foods chicken farmers who had been trying to form an organization for poultry growers. The farmers confronted Henson at her home, and she told them that Tyson Foods had been giving the farmers chicks from older hens. She told the farmers she had seen paperwork showing the ages of the hens. She stood by the story under oath in court. Cynthia Johnson, an attorney who has represented chicken farmers for decades, said that depositions in many lawsuits against poultry companies show that plant managers can determine t
he health of baby chicks based on the age of the hens that lay them, a metric that most companies track to a great level of detail.

  The pattern Perry Edwards saw at the Waldron plant looked unmistakable to him, and so was the reason behind it. As he looked through the figures, Edwards wasn’t surprised to see which farmers were at the bottom of the ladder and which consistently got delivered bad chicks. The latter were the Bill Bethels of the world. The complainers. It was understood within the office that those who complained would be marked. And it was as obvious as a list of names on a bulletin board who was who. Some farmers went with the program and ensured the system ran smoothly. And others, he believed, posed a threat by complaining, calling the office, or demanding more money.

  Edwards did not see any evidence that Tyson Foods delivered sick birds to Jerry and Kanita Yandell to retaliate against them for any perceived bad behavior. But what he observed was that the company had the ability to do so if it wanted to. Farmers around Waldron did not have the front-row view of this power that Edwards was afforded. But they knew it existed. They felt it. They perpetually feared it. And for that reason, they often stifled their complaints and took what Tyson gave them.

  * * *

  After New Year’s Day of 2004, Jerry Yandell sat in the office at Chambers Bank in downtown Waldron. He was speaking with a loan officer who had driven an hour down from Fort Smith to visit the bank’s small branch and talk over Jerry’s troubling debt of $260,000. The bankers had started calling Jerry that winter. He’d been able to make only half of his mortgage payment each month and was barely keeping up with the interest on his loan. When the bankers called, he explained what was happening clear and simple. They hung up, only to call back a few days later to ask if he possibly had extra money he could put toward the note. He didn’t.