According to the Yandells, by January they had received three batches of sick birds from Tyson, and they’d lost money with each flock. So there Jerry sat in the glassed-in office just off the bank lobby by the front door. Customers who filed in and out of the lobby saw him sitting there, speaking with the well-dressed banker on the other side of the desk. It must have been obvious to everyone that Jerry Yandell was a man on the edge of ruin.
Jerry and the banker went over the math of Jerry’s life. And it wasn’t complicated.
He owed the bank about $3,500 for every batch of chickens he grew. On good batches, Jerry got paid a total of $6,500 for his six weeks of labor. After paying his mortgage, he usually owed $1,500 for propane to heat the houses (when the chicks were very young they needed to feel like they were inside a brooder) and $250 for electricity. That left him $1,250 at the end of a batch. Which meant he made $208 a week, or $5.20 an hour. On good batches, he might make $9.16 an hour.
In just a few months time, the farming operation the Yandells had built over twenty-six years had been pulled so far under it appeared unsalvageable.
He had been paid roughly $4,000 for each batch of the sick birds, leaving him nothing at the end of six weeks. The disease hit during the winter months, when propane costs were $3,000 a batch or more. The field techs had told him to superheat the houses, and on their advice he was also venting the heated air outside.
The second batch had been the same, with Jerry getting paid less money than it cost to pay his mortgage and bills. He expected the third batch would be even worse, when all was said and done. By the time he met with his banker, Jerry owed the fuel company $7,000.
Accepting another batch of chicks from Tyson would mean borrowing more money from the fuel company, getting further behind on his mortgage, and working seven days a week to do it. The banker advised him to declare bankruptcy. If Jerry put up his house and ten acres of land, he could probably cover most of the debt for the chicken houses.
Jerry asked the banker if he had any pull with the men at Tyson. If Jerry could just get one batch of good birds, maybe then he could start to dig his way out of this.
* * *
Kanita photographed the men in blue suits as they emptied the remaining chicken carcasses from her houses and loaded them into freezers that were already overflowing with dead birds.
She approached the field techs by the truck and asked what they knew and why they were dressed in biohazard suits. They told her the suits were a precaution, nothing to worry about.
— I’ll be ruined by this, she said. I’ll lose my farm.
— I’m sorry, the field man said. He shrugged at his powerlessness to do anything about it.
— You look at my boys and you tell them how sorry you are about it, she said.
* * *
In March 2004, Jerry and Kanita sat in an office with their attorney and signed paper after paper that cemented their bankruptcy. They had never defaulted on a dollar of debt in their lives together. Jerry suspected they’d never be able to borrow a dime again, and he was right. The Yandells listed all their assets to be counted against their debt. A court date was set for that summer in Fort Smith, where a federal judge would dispense with the matter and determine which creditor got what.
Shortly after signing the papers, Kanita took out an advertisement in the Waldron News, the local paper that was printed from an office on Main Street.
Bold letters across the top declared:
AUCTION
PERSONAL PROPERTY
SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2004
The ad listed items that would be for sale that day. It was an inventory of the Yandells’ home: Dell computer; porch swing; Rainbow vacuum; one hay fork; small freezer; two dressers; one Lincoln Welder; oak dining table and six chairs. Down the center of the ad there were crudely drawn clip-art pictures of a dresser, a hammer and nails, and a riding lawn mower. The ad was a catalog of middle-class life in rural Arkansas.
The Saturday auction was busy. By the end of it, the Yandells’ home was empty.
* * *
In the spring of 2004, Jerry walked the trails on a blasted hillside. The ground was covered in soot, the burned tree trunks stood aloft and stinking of cinders after the fire passed through. Jerry was part of a work crew that walked through the ruined wilderness. The hills had been swept by wildfire, and Jerry’s crew built dump sites in the woods where they set up heavy equipment to dispose of big brush piles the forestry crews left behind as they cleared the woods. All day, Jerry chipped the piles of burned brush, his arms and face covered in black ash, before moving on to the next dump site. He made $150 a day when he could get work.
Jerry had gotten the job with the crew after hearing that FEMA was looking for help in California. Fires had swept through the hills and devoured subdivisions, and men were needed to clear out the burned brush left behind. Jerry had taken his son’s truck and driven out west looking for work, just as he’d done as a child when his parents took him to the orchards. But this time he was alone in the cab of the truck.
He found a small apartment to rent near San Bernardino and shared it with a man he knew from Scott County. During the day they followed the loggers and found their brush piles and fed the blackened limbs into the chipper. They passed gutted houses and cul-de-sacs covered in ash. All of it ruined.
At night he lay awake, with fear gnawing at him. He thought about the papers he and Kanita had signed to declare bankruptcy, about their debts for the propane and the mortgage on their chicken houses. Everything was on the line to cover it: their house, their land, and their cars. It had been just four months, just sixteen weeks or so, since the first batch of sick birds arrived.
He let himself toy with hope. Maybe he could earn enough money on the brush crew to finance one more flock—just one flock to make a little cash, maybe break even. That’s all he would need. Maybe then he could pay down the debt he’d taken on over the winter, the debt that had swallowed his life. He had borrowed money against his house and land to finance the farm. The house where his sons were raised. The stable home they knew and the trucks they drove. All of it was bound up in the debt. Lawyers were deciding somewhere right now how it would be divvied up and what the Yandells would be able to have in the end.
Jerry didn’t sleep at night, and during the day his mind stayed numb and tired as he pushed burned branches into a wood chipper. More than twenty-five years of chicken farming had brought him here.
* * *
About a month before his bankruptcy hearing, Jerry Yandell moved back to Arkansas. He woke up in his old bedroom. The floor and walls were bare, and the room was empty. He lay on a borrowed bed with Kanita, who was still asleep. The house was very quiet. He had returned from California the week before, after getting news that Kanita’s father had just had a heart attack. He needed to be back home, in Waldron, to help her family. So he quit his job with FEMA and went home.
The Yandells’ home was left vacant while the couple waited for the bankruptcy case to be settled. So they decided to live there, in the empty house, until their court date. Jerry didn’t quite know if he or the bank owned the house. But he still had the keys, and no one had shown up to run him out yet. So each night he and Kanita slept there like squatters.
They set up a hot plate and small microwave in the kitchen. The water was still running, so they washed the few dishes they had in the sink.
Jerry had built this house, five years earlier. He had poured the concrete foundation and framed out the walls and put the roof on with his son Jeremy. He had paid outright for the materials and owned all the land around it. Back then he was flush with cash, having sold off two chicken houses a few miles away.
Jerry’s three sons knew a life then that he’d barely dreamed of living when he was a child. Jerry and Kanita bought each of their sons a four-wheeler that they rode over the pastures and along the wooded hillsides around the house. Their boys got their own trucks when they were teenagers, and the family went on vacat
ion each summer. They saw Mount Rushmore and traveled to Florida. They stayed in hotels and didn’t worry about the cost.
Jerry had gotten comfortable in this home. He thought it was a new plateau for his family, a place he’d reached after climbing for many years. His house, its concrete foundation, was the bedrock of their middle-class life. It was something he and Kanita thought they would build on over the years, handing it over to their sons when they passed away. He was proud on those summer vacations, proud of what he could give the boys and Kanita. It was a horizon that his father had worked toward all his life but never reached.
Now Jerry walked through the empty rooms into the kitchen to microwave his breakfast. He could see out the windows and look at the grass outside. It was a nice view, and Jerry savored it while he could. Before too long, he wouldn’t be allowed on this property.
This house was the high-water mark of the Yandells’ affluence. It was an empty monument for a dream. In just a few weeks he would be back where his father had been: harvesting lumber, taking odd jobs in town, working construction when jobs were available. Maybe his mistake had been expecting something more out of life.
News of the Yandells’ ruin spread fast around Waldron. Jerry ran into friends and neighbors at the gas station, and they were polite about everything. Many people didn’t bring it up at all. He never called the Tyson plant, and they didn’t call him. Jerry let the bankruptcy lawyer handle all of that. Yandell never had any evidence that Tyson Foods intentionally delivered sick birds to his farm to target him, and the company later refused to answer questions about the incident. Regardless, the damage was done.
Jerry Yandell wasn’t the only farmer to receive batches of sick birds, and as he was heading to bankruptcy court his neighbors began to compare notes. Doug Elmore, who also grew chickens outside of Waldron but had never met Jerry Yandell (though their farms were ranked against one another), heard about Yandell’s trouble. Elmore was having the same problem. Flocks of birds were dying mysteriously, in spite of his best efforts to save them. Elmore had tried to get his birds tested at a laboratory to find out what was making them die, but a lawyer told him he couldn’t do that because Tyson technically owned the birds. Elmore asked Tyson to test some of the dead chickens. The company told Elmore that, according to its tests, a high level of ammonia appeared to have sickened the birds. That meant, in essence, it was Elmore’s fault.
Edwin, who lived just a few miles down Highway 80 from the Yandells’ house, heard the same stories and began to understand why his own flocks had been dying out. He too had labored for weeks carrying the birds out to the freezer, thinking he must have gotten a batch with the flu or some other disease. He’d wondered whether his old houses were to blame. Even Jerry Yandell’s sister Carry Owens, who knew what was happening at her brother’s place, began seeing her own flocks die.
Up and down the valleys, the stories spread from farm to farm. The Elmores and Owenses and Edwins began putting hard questions to their field techs. What was the matter with the birds? If it was just a problem with the heating and ventilation, then why were birds dying on other farms, in newer houses? The field techs relayed their questions to Gary Roper, and soon the field techs began delivering the same answer to their isolated clients on the farm. The company initially speculated that something might be wrong with the baby chicks’ digestion, causing them to die off. But eventually the company blamed the farmers, noting that ammonia levels were high inside the chicken houses where some of the birds died. Outside experts said Tyson’s hatchery was a key suspect as a possible cause for the high mortality. Tyson Foods never publicly revealed if anything went wrong inside its hatchery that caused birds to sicken and die around Waldron.
Even years later, many farmers affected by the problem still had no idea what had happened. Tyson Foods eventually fixed the problem, whatever might have been the cause, but not soon enough to save the Yandells’ farm. Eventually, Jerry and Kanita drove up to the federal courthouse in Fort Smith. They waited in line outside a courtroom for their name to be called. Then they went inside and sat at a table with a judge and several lawyers circled around it. Assets and debts were discussed, and it was decided all their assets would be sold or conveyed to the creditors to pay down the debt. Even after losing their home and their land, the Yandells still owed money. Their future paychecks would be garnished to pay it off over the years.
As he made his rulings, the judge was friendly toward Jerry and Kanita. Toward the end of the meeting, he turned and addressed Jerry, who was seated just a few feet away.
— Chicken farming is not too good, is it?
— No, it’s not, Jerry replied.
— I understand, the judge replied.
* * *
Jerry Yandell never fought back. He never filed a lawsuit and never filed a case with the U.S. Department of Agriculture division that was created specifically to protect farmers like him. After losing his farm, Yandell took the kind of odd jobs that had supported his family growing up. He eventually got a job working on a road crew around Waldron. Yandell’s bankruptcy went mostly unnoticed outside the small network of his friends and relatives.
When the Yandells went out of business, they were followed by many of their neighbors. The profits were being drained from their farms, and many felt they had no choice but to leave the business. As they quit, they took down the red aluminum signs by their driveways that once advertised their Tyson farms. All along the highways outside Waldron the signs came down, erasing the landmarks that once carried names like Yandell, Forrest, and Kelly.
The collapse of these farms did not appear to harm the Tyson plant in Waldron, nor even slow down its production. The company found a new crop of farmers who were willing to sign new contracts. The old farm signs were replaced with new ones, this time emblazoned with names like Phouthavong and Sengkhamyong and Vongsyprasom. These signs were erected by Laotian immigrants who had moved to Arkansas and bought ruined farms from local families. Stories about chicken farming had been spreading through the tightly knit networks of Asian immigrants who worked in factories and fast-food franchises in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. Chicken farming looked great on paper, with a farm of three houses generating $300,000 in cash a year. And the cost of living in small-town Arkansas and Oklahoma was just a fraction of what the immigrants paid in cities up north.
And so immigrants like Cecil Phrasounonh moved to Waldron. Cecil bought a Tyson farm from a man who was desperate to leave the business. The farm had two chicken houses and a small shed that Cecil moved into. He installed a potbellied stove for warmth, slept on a mattress on the floor, and used a primitive outhouse for his bathroom.
Cecil and his brethren were the farmers of the future. Their arrival was inevitable, because it was what Tyson dictated. Just as longtime local workers left their jobs inside Tyson’s slaughterhouses and were replaced by Hispanic workers, local farmers dropped their contracts and left their farms and were replaced by men and women like Cecil. They were obeying a mathematical formula that exerted a downward pressure on all things it touched. It pushed down costs and living standards and expectations. The pressure drove men and women down until they couldn’t take it. Then it drove them out and found new men and women to take their place. The pressure never ended, and it was exerted on every farm where Tyson operated. It was an old pressure and impossible to stop.
The roots of this pressure went deep, went back decades, all the way to the birth of Tyson Foods. To really understand how the company came to be and how it obtained the power that it has in modern times, it helps to start at the beginning, back before the Great Depression. That’s when a young farmer named John Tyson came upon hard times.
* * *
1. “Farm” being an antiquated and misleading term often used to describe the heavily indebted industrial footprint of four loosely regulated factories under Jerry Yandell’s control, with each factory housing flocks of 75,000 chickens at a time, grown under the exacting specifications of Tyso
n Foods, the nation’s largest meat company.
2. Tyson Foods refused to comment in detail on its relationship with the Yandells or the problems on their farm. The company provided a broad statement in response to a list of dozens of detailed questions sent to the company after this book was completed. That statement is printed in full at the beginning of the Notes, and readers are encouraged to read it.
3. Tyson Foods said it has a computerized system with “safeguards in place” to make sure farmers are not credited with the wrong batch of birds, but the company refused to describe those safeguards.
4. Bethel said that on more than one occasion he received the wrong kind of chicken feed from Tyson Foods, a mistake that hurt production on his egg-laying farm. Bethel sometimes found bolts, screws, and even a wrench inside his feed bins. Bethel said he was not aware that Tyson sent him feed contaminated with gravel, but that it would not surprise him. His farm was close to the plant, and he assumed the company considered it a convenient spot to “dump” unwanted or leftover feed.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
The Eden Crash
(1929–1958)
IN 1930, a twenty-five-year-old man named John Tyson was exiled from his family’s farm in Missouri. His inheritance was one working truck and one half bale of hay to sell on the open market.
A college student studying agriculture at Kansas State University, Tyson was preparing to walk in his father’s footsteps and inherit the family farm outside Kansas City, the type of small operation where kids like John Tyson helped raise cattle, hogs, and corn. But just a year before, the world had been upended by speculators and bankers on Wall Street who had somehow inflated the stock market to ludicrous heights through lies, self-delusions, and drunken speculation. It wasn’t at all clear to farmers like Tyson just what exactly had gone wrong in New York, but it was clear that the stock market crash had brought to an end a decade of prosperity and national dreams of grandeur.
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business Page 5
