Midwesterners felt the shock wave of the collapse in their bones. Prices for produce, grain, and livestock collapsed, rendering a summer’s labor worthless in the snap of time it took for a telegraph to arrive from the East Coast. It was hard to find work in the big cities, near impossible in the small towns.
Before the crash, John Tyson would have had every expectation that his family’s farm would be able to support him and his wife as they began their life together. But after 1929, the farm’s meager income could hardly keep his father afloat. So John got all he would ever get from the farm: the truck, the hay to raise a little cash, and his father’s best wishes to have a good life. John and his young wife made the long car trip south through Missouri and into Arkansas, toward Fort Smith, where he’d heard there were jobs.
The few photographs that capture John Tyson in his youth show him as a lanky man with a narrow face and pinched expression that reflected the hard times he’d known. Those who knew him said he had little time for sentimentality. As he turned his back on the farm where he was raised, and the stable life it had promised, it seems likely John Tyson didn’t take much time to feel sorry for himself. He wouldn’t have had time for reflection anyway. He ran out of money well before he ever reached Fort Smith and its promised jobs and found himself marooned in the small town of Springdale, planted in the middle of the wide-open green plains of the Ozark Plateau in northwestern Arkansas.
The people of Springdale were known as hill folks, remote and backward, disconnected from the world. The rocky red soil around town wasn’t good for growing row crops like corn, soybeans, or cotton, leaving the area poor and separated from the rest of the state’s plantation economy. But there was some money to be made from the richer soils west of town, where orchards were plentiful and landowners cultivated wide, neat rows of peaches, grapes, and strawberries during the long summers.
John Tyson rented a house in town with his wife and used his inheritance, in the form of one rickety truck, to start making a living. He hauled fruit to markets in Kansas City and Saint Louis—deliveries that kept him away from home for days at a time. But with each trip he brought home enough money to pay rent and buy food, relative luxuries in those days. John hired local men to drive overnight trips with him for no more payment than a single meal. Over time he developed a steady business and got to know the farmers and orchard keepers west of Springdale. He worked every day, any hours he was awake, without question. It’s what he needed to do to survive.
And by 1931, he needed all the work he could get. He had a new baby boy depending on him, named Don.
* * *
The ruination of a family farm was more than just a business failure in the 1930s. It represented the collapse of a political and economic system that sustained a fifth of the American population and provided a foundation for the middle class. Seventy years later, the decimation of the family farm is an accepted fact of American life and is mourned only in sentimental terms. But as it cascaded through the nation, the wave of farm failures during the Great Depression was an unprecedented calamity. Families weren’t just losing their livelihoods; they were also losing their homes and their birthrights. It would be as if the banks of today foreclosed on entire Manhattan neighborhoods at once, evicting the residents and emptying block after block of apartment buildings, leaving families adrift without the benefit of a public safety net to help pay the bills.
For more than a hundred and fifty years before the Depression, the family farm was the basic economic and social building block of the country. Thomas Jefferson wrote paeans to independent farmers, not just because he thought that farming was a pretty and virtuous thing, but because it represented the keystone of a democratic society at the time. For centuries, a citizen’s relationship with land had been at the center of a society’s power structure. In the European Dark Ages, the feudal system of land ownership had divided citizens into broad classes of lords and serfs, creating a system of centralized power, parceled out by access to land. The lords owned everything, and serfs owned nothing but their labor, which they exchanged for a plot of land on which to live and grow food at the lord’s behest and whimsy.
If Thomas Jefferson had been writing a play, the feudal lords would have been his villains in black, and the system they created the dark nightmare from which humankind was trying to escape. So along came America, where citizens threw off the mantle of colonial power (which was an outgrowth of Europe’s dark feudal history) and were given the right to control their government through voting.1 Initially, only landowners could vote in America, so farming was deeply entwined with citizenship. In the minds of thinkers like Jefferson, the relationship between agriculture and citizenship ran deep —Jefferson realized the power to vote alone wasn’t a sufficient guarantee of liberty and sovereignty. For that, citizens needed land. They needed to own land and have access to the resources that could nourish them and grant them economic independence. So Jefferson became history’s best-known advocate of the system of agrarian democracy, whereby a patchwork of independent farmers—all of them economically self-sufficient but also connected through the open market for their goods—sprawled across the vast new land that was the ever-increasing United States of America.
And it worked, for the first time in history, really, because there was this ultra-rare historical window during which a young country was rapidly gaining new land on which to settle.2
From Jefferson’s seminal era in the late 1700s until John Tyson’s father had established a successful farm years later, a new system of land-owning, self-sufficient, democratically empowered citizens emerged. And the farms established a new culture in the United States, one of self-reliance and democratic power. That historical fact is probably at the root of our vague sentimental mourning for the family farm and all we lost along with it. Even in 2012, there is a sense that somehow, without small towns and rural communities, America has lost a piece of itself, even though most people today would never want to actually live on a farm or in a rural community.
For John Tyson’s generation, the farm crisis was an injury still new and raw. The loss of the farm was a profound eviction. It was the loss of a system and the breaking of a promise. Young families found themselves nomadic, needing to escape the collapse of market prices and the blasting environmental scourge of the Dust Bowl. They migrated toward the coasts. They picked fruit or built roads as government workers. They searched for factory jobs. They became beggars and, in some cases, alcoholics.
They fled an economic system that was collapsing.
But in the rarest of cases, such as John Tyson’s, these refugees created an economic system that was altogether new to America.
* * *
In 1931 Springdale was a tiny crosshatch of streets populated by modest houses and small stores. Even eighty years later, the architecture of Springdale is utilitarian, and it speaks to a meager past where the greatest economic ambition was to put food on the table and little else. Today, the tallest buildings downtown are the grain silos, and the commercial strip downtown is a squat reef of one- and two-story rectangular buildings that look as though they were designed by architects who felt that tilting their heads upward was overly presumptuous. A building was as tall as it must be to fulfill its designated function and no taller.
It was the economic badlands, and John Tyson was stranded there with a wife, a one-year-old son, and a truck. Yet he had insinuated himself into the orchard economy west of town, becoming a regular produce shipper who ran routes to city markets up north.
Don’s earliest memories were of strange men sleeping in a room in the back of his house between trips with his father. John paid the men a dollar a day, or in some cases simply gave them a hamburger and a cup of coffee to rent their company on an overnight haul to Kansas City. Sometimes Don’s mother accompanied John, and they left the boy with a neighbor. Don was raised in a commercial house, where visitors were poor men desperate for work, and the rhythm of family life revolved around John Tyson’s shipp
ing schedule.
Don was an observant child. He took it all in.
* * *
The orchards outside Springdale had been profitable for decades, but in the early 1930s the fruit business began to slowly collapse. Dry summers and hard winter freezes drove many apple growers to failure. The hot winds from Oklahoma brought new pests: worms and mites and fungi that ate away at the peaches and berries. This happened just a few unlucky decades before the Green Revolution, when the invention of pesticides made it possible to grow homogenized crops on thousands of contiguous acres. In the 1930s, however, the pests spread unrestrained through the orchards. Fewer and fewer farmers needed John Tyson to ship their crops up north.
But John Tyson noticed a new opportunity growing in the shadow of the orchards. More farmers were increasing their investment in chickens, which used to be a kind of agricultural side bet they’d long used to generate a little cash in the winter months or after a weak harvest.
There had always been chickens roaming the grass and dirt lots around farmhouses and barns, but more farmers were experimenting with building big houses in which to raise them, growing enough to kill dozens and pack them in ice for a trip up to urban markets. Chicken was a delicacy in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, where housewives bought them whole and took them home to clean and cook for special occasions and Sunday dinners. For farmers, the trick was growing enough chickens at one time to make it worth their efforts. A wild profusion of oversize chicken coops sprang up along the edges of orchards to serve this purpose. Wooden sheds with tarpaper roofs and coal heaters in the bottom appeared, some built on wooden skids so they could be moved from spot to spot in order to have fresh grass beneath them. The chicken houses had all manner of tubes and vents installed to give the birds air and to blow out the noxious ammonia from their droppings. The hardest part was heating the houses to keep baby chicks alive. Kerosene lamps and coal stoves were used, and accidental fires were common.
As the fruit business declined, John Tyson began to haul more chickens. It was profitable but tricky. The chickens would stop eating as they jostled up rutted roads during trips that took several days, losing the precious weight that determined John Tyson’s profit margin. So Tyson built a truck with a metal trough that ran between the chicken crates. He filled it with a mushy paste of water and food. The chickens pecked at it enough to keep the weight on during their trip. Soon John was hauling nothing but chickens.
* * *
Within a few years of arriving in Springdale, John Tyson was running a steady pipeline of live chickens from Arkansas to northern cities as far away as Chicago, Detroit, and Saint Louis.
The price disparities between those urban markets and the farms outside Springdale was so wide he made $250 from a single haul. He used the money to buy more birds and developed a regular coterie of farmers who built more, and larger, chicken houses to supply him. The chicken-house fires became rare as farmers figured out better ways to ventilate the big sheds, and the University of Arkansas extension system taught them which breeds grew biggest and fastest.
John divorced and remarried, bringing Helen Tyson into the family home when Don was still a child. Over the years, as his small shipping company grew, John Tyson became a respected businessman in Springdale. But the income wasn’t dependable. Chicken prices swung fast, depending on the vagaries of big-city markets. Sometimes the profit on a load of chickens was wiped out in the time it took to deliver them. And John Tyson saw a steadier business in the local feed mills. A number of feed dealers had sprung up around Springdale to supply the growing number of chicken farms. Feed was the most expensive ingredient for chicken farming, and the profit margins were fat. Tyson signed a contract with Ralston Purina and became the company’s local dealer. When Ralston later canceled his contract, he started buying grain and mixing it with vitamins to make his own brand of feed. He sold it to farmers and picked up their birds to ship north, making money on both ends of the deal.
* * *
By the time Don was ten years old, he was pressed into service at his father’s business. It wasn’t a question of wanting to join. He simply did what he was told. But the boy was quick to learn and eager to help. He helped his dad at the new feed business, using a shovel to mix piles of tawny grain in an empty warehouse. He and his dad packed crates of chickens in the back of Helen’s car and shipped them across town. John built some chicken houses behind his company’s small office, and Don spent his afternoons after school cleaning the coops and feeding the birds.
At night, Don Tyson sat at the family dinner table with John and Helen, listening to them talk back and forth about the family business. Soon he and his dad would spend long evenings engaged in their own discussions as Helen kept the books, entering the day’s accounts in neat script.
* * *
Business was good but volatile. Farmers were discovering the unique economy of growing chickens, which was riskier than selling crops or raising cattle. One rooster with six hens could produce enough chickens to fill a chicken house in weeks, and the birds grew to maturity in a matter of a few months, rather than the two years it took to raise a cow or the season it took for cotton and corn. That meant the chicken population fluctuated with the frenzy of a stock market.
This made John Tyson’s business almost entirely unpredictable. One day he might have too many birds to ship and need to hire extra drivers. Another day, after the price crashed and farmers cut back, he would have nothing. He needed a way to steady his income, since it was seemingly impossible to steady the market.
For Tyson, controlling the chicken farms was paramount to his success. What he needed more than anything in the early 1940s was a steady supply of birds. He had more demand than ever from customers up north. World War II was making big demands on resources and the government had rationed beef and pork but not chicken. Grocery stores wanted to buy all the chicken that Tyson could sell them to help fill up their meat counters. But if he came up empty-handed, the grocery chains would look to other suppliers to meet their needs.
Left on their own, farmers couldn’t be counted on to supply Tyson enough chickens. They overproduced when prices were up, then grew gun-shy and refused to raise new flocks when prices were low. As orchards disappeared they were being replaced with casino-like poultry farms.
To solve the problem of undependable farmers, Tyson simply needed to look east, toward the scrubby Ozark Mountains and the marshy delta region beyond.
* * *
Farmers in the Ozark hill country were long on labor and short on capital.
In the 1930s and 1940s, they worked a thin layer of soil on the rocky bones of mountains, and after just a few generations of farming they had usually depleted the ground until it yielded very little. Big families had returned to hunting and foraging for some of their food, barely scratching a living out of a few hogs and cash crops. Cotton was the crop of choice: green, reedy rows planted in the most fertile soil along riverbeds in the valleys. The crops were reachable only by narrow, steep footpaths, inaccessible to farm machinery. They were a desperate man’s imitation of a cash crop, and everyone knew cotton production was not a way to get rich.
For John Tyson, the lesson wasn’t in the crops or the soil. It was in the financing. Cash-poor farmers rented land, and their landowners arranged a credit system that financed crops up front for the farmers who were broke. So the landowner provided the money, the farmer provided the labor, and they split the money when the crop came to fruition. The system spread throughout the South, carried on the back of poverty, allowing wealthy landowners and bankers to raise crops without working the land, while forcing farmers to grow crops they would never truly own.
In shorthand, it was called tenant farming.
The method slowly migrated to Springdale, where John Tyson and other feed dealers were trying to ensure a steady supply of chicken. The feed dealers started providing their product up front for farmers, collecting their payment when the chickens were sold. Then they started fronti
ng the money to buy chickens as well.
John Tyson took it a step further. He bought the chickens himself from a hatchery, then he essentially loaned them to farmers who agreed to raise the birds and get paid a fixed price on delivery. The farmer didn’t take any risk on prices because he never owned the birds, and Tyson got his steady flow of chickens to deliver to customers up north.
The system worked well, but that still left Tyson dependent on a hatchery for his birds. He got so frustrated depending on other companies for baby chicks that he eventually bought a hatchery of his own.
John Tyson consolidated his network of chicken farms, the feed mill, and the hatchery. It was like a deep well that gushed more profits with each day. He had effectively purchased every point in the chain of production where someone else might have made a profit, or inconveniently increased his cost of business. He made the feed. He hatched the birds. He paid farmers to raise them. And he shipped them north. In 1947 he incorporated his company, Tyson Feed and Hatchery.
* * *
Don Tyson watched. He listened to his father talk at night over the dinner table. And Don saw his father fire workers with all the sentimentality of a farmer flicking the head off a rooster with a sharp hatchet. It was simple: Do what John said. Or you were fired.
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business Page 6
