Don did what his father said.
When Don was a teenager, his father sent him to the University of Missouri to take a course in testing birds for disease. He spent long hours in the hatchery, drawing blood from hens, mixing it with an antigen in a petri dish and ensuring the health of the flock. By the time he was sixteen, he was driving trucks and shipping birds outside of the state when drivers weren’t available.
* * *
There is a photo of John Tyson, somewhere during this time, perhaps in the early 1950s, standing in front of a wood-slatted chicken house and holding a white chicken in his hands. His face looks as drawn and stern as the times in which he was raised. His wan smile looks as utilitarian as a farm hat. He holds the bird with all the affection of a shovel. He was a man who never forgot the dark cloud of poverty from which he ran until the day he died. Each day at work, each nightly conversation at the table with his son, was a long campaign to survive and to ensure the family’s future.
And no matter how hard they worked, or how much money they made, it would never be enough to ease John Tyson’s hunger to make more.
* * *
As Tyson’s company slowly grew in Arkansas, a new agricultural economy was developing in the United States. Like Tyson’s endeavor, this new economic structure could be traced back to the early 1930s, when the fabric of the rural Midwest was coming unraveled. During the Great Depression, farmers raised bountiful crops but couldn’t sell them for enough money to pay their rent or their bank loans or to buy food for their family. In states like Iowa, banks that tried to auction off foreclosed properties were met by groups of farmers toting guns. The armed men stood at the public auction and ensured that the original owner of the farm could buy it back for a bid of one dollar. The “dollar auctions” became common as small towns fought for their survival.
In response, politicians in Washington passed a series of bailouts and emergency programs to help the middle class.
A federal law called the Agricultural Adjustment Act let the government set the volume and the price of the nation’s biggest crops. Passed in 1933, the act created a new bureaucracy in which economists figured out how many acres of wheat or cotton farmers could raise in order to fix prices at a profitable level. The government set edicts for crops after the economists finished their calculations. To eliminate surpluses, farmers plowed under acres of cotton plants and slaughtered millions of baby hogs so they would never reach the market. The idea was to keep prices high enough to throw the middle class a lifeline and iron out the volatility of the market. Critics of the plan said it would lead to a dangerous level of government control over the economy, but they were answered with a simple response: The laws were temporary. They were emergency actions that would be repealed once farm prices stabilized.
In Arkansas, the new edicts all but wiped out the cotton farmers who scratched a living from the Ozark soil, creating a willing crop of farmers to build chicken coops and buy chicks on contract from John Tyson. It wasn’t the first gift that John Tyson would get from government intervention. The emergency measures would not only stay in place over the next seventy-five years, they would expand and evolve, and deliver to Tyson exactly what he needed most: cheap, reliable supplies of grain.
* * *
When he was twenty-three years old, in 1953, Don Tyson took a trip to the local bank while his father, John, was on vacation. He knew it was the only chance he’d have, sitting in a chair at a bank, talking with a loan officer and seeing just how much money he could get away with borrowing.
He had plenty to borrow against. His father’s company was growing and it now had an office in downtown Springdale. Regular shipments of chickens were sent north and sold, and batch after batch of chicks rolled out of Tyson’s hatchery. The company was hauling the chicks, as well as tons of feed, to a growing network of farms that were being built on the flat plains around Springdale and on the denuded hillsides in the Ozarks. The company was generating the kind of cash John Tyson never would have dreamed of possessing when he left his family farm nearly twenty-five years before. And in a way, he didn’t possess it. Every penny and every dime was instantly plowed back into more production: more feed to mix, more chicks to deliver, and more trucks and drivers to ship north.
Don could see the profits just over the horizon, and he wanted to borrow money to make them happen. But John refused to borrow. He had seen the farms around his father’s take on loans during the 1920s, when crop prices were good and people wanted to believe the good times would last forever. What happened in 1929 didn’t teach John Tyson a lesson so much as it permanently scarred his appetite for risk and debt.
So Don simply waited for his father to go on vacation before he visited the bank.
When the loan officer asked Don how much he wanted to borrow, Don simply asked how much he could have. The banker said the maximum loan they could extend was $80,000.
— Well, that’s how much I want then, Don said.
He wired the money to Michigan, where a hatchery was selling cheap birds. The hatchery had badly misread the market and hatched a flock of chicks just as prices fell through the floor. The hatchery was unloading the chicks for the bargain price of three cents each. It cost Don Tyson about ten cents to hatch a bird on his own. So buying the birds at such a steep discount gave Tyson a huge cost advantage, and fatter profit margins. Don Tyson sunk the entire $80,000 into the deal. He bought the cheap chicks, paid farmers to raise them, and sold them at a profitable enough price to pay back the loan and invest a profit in Tyson’s accounts.
Don told his father what he had done. For a while John Tyson was quiet.
— You done good, he finally said.
* * *
Don became a field veterinarian, traveling from farm to farm and checking on the health of the flocks. He learned much of what he knew at the University of Arkansas, where he studied animal nutrition and economics. He did well at the university but never graduated, as there was too much work to be done at the company.
Don knew chickens like some men knew complicated farm machinery. He knew when the birds were sick or when they were just overheated and needed more air. He knew when they needed more food and when they needed less. And when a Tyson truck delivered chicks from the Tyson hatchery and feed from the Tyson feed mill, Don showed up at the farm to tell the farmer how to grow the chicks.
Every night he and his father talked business: what was going wrong, where they needed to cut, and what they needed to expand. They noticed that more companies were opening slaughterhouses around Missouri and Arkansas built especially to process chickens. Tyson had a growing customer base with supermarkets in Kansas City and Saint Louis, and the markets wanted the birds feathered and gutted so the butchers could easily quarter them and display the parts for weekend specials.
If there was a slaughterhouse in Springdale, the Tysons could cut their shipping costs and wring more profit from the system. Don started meeting with men from the Springdale chamber of commerce, trying to convince them to lure a plant into town. He told them about the good jobs it would bring, stable factory jobs that were rare in Springdale in the mid-1950s.
The chamber and the Tysons pooled their money and bought twenty acres north of town. A company out of Kansas City said it was interested in locating there, and Don thought he had them on the hook. But the company backed out, opting to build in Missouri and leaving the twenty acres sitting like an empty promise.
— We should build a plant there, Don told his father.
If they owned a plant, he reasoned, they could kill the chickens themselves and sell directly to the markets. John asked him how much money it would cost, and Don came up with the best sales pitch he could think of: He lied. It could easily cost close to $100,000, but Don said he could do it for $75,000. So John Tyson fronted his son the money, and construction began.
Don visited other plants to see how they worked. He lined up the purchase of new machinery built just to process chickens. He bought big vats of
scalding water into which chickens were dipped to remove the feathers and long assembly lines where rows of workers used sharp blades to unzip the birds’ breasts and scoop out their organs. He bought crates of ice to place at the end of an assembly line where the fresh carcasses were stacked for shipment. He bought the innards of his first slaughterhouse, piece by piece, and learned the process as he went. Then he ran out of money.
Don had spent the full $75,000 and the slaughterhouse was still skeletal, weeks from completion. Workers were already anticipating the jobs there, which were promised to pay seventy-five cents an hour, a full dime above minimum wage. Don went to his father and said he needed just a little more money to finish the job. John Tyson said no. The price tag was $75,000, and he’d already paid it. Don went to investors in town and lined up $10,000 from one and $5,000 from another.
When the first Tyson slaughterhouse was completed in 1958, there wasn’t enough money left to paint it. The parking lot was a bare patch of dirt because they didn’t have the gravel to cover it. Still, more than a hundred employees showed up the first day, and trucks delivered hundreds of live chickens to the bay door. The disassembly line of workers came to life. The vats boiled. The tubs filled with entrails. The ice-laden crates filled with chickens.
And Don oversaw it all.
At the end of the first day, they’d slaughtered and cleaned three thousand birds. Birds they’d hatched. Birds they’d fed. Birds they’d hauled to the killing floor. With the slaughterhouse in place, Tyson stood to make a profit from every link in the long chain.
Then a government inspector looked over the bounty, and, box by box, all the chicken was condemned. The birds were covered in grease slicks and scraps of metal from the new machinery.
The workers stood idly by and watched as their harvest was deemed to be trash. They helped haul the icy carcasses to the landfill.
John Tyson got a certain look in his eye before he fired people. His employees said that at such moments “Mr. John was in orbit.” And when he was in orbit, he fired workers like he was pulling weeds. As he stood in the slaughterhouse listening to his son explain that the first day’s chickens had been wasted, John Tyson went into orbit. He had sunk a fortune into this slaughterhouse and invested weeks of farm work and tons of feed into raising the chickens. And it was all for nothing.
— I can throw three thousand chickens away. You don’t have to process them to do that, John Tyson told his son.
Everyone stood far from John Tyson and left Don there to talk to him. Because they all knew there was only one person in the company whom John Tyson could not fire.
* * *
By the end of 1958, Don Tyson had mastered the art of running an industrial slaughterhouse. His team of employees learned how to run the machines efficiently while avoiding mishaps that could ruin the meat. Eventually, the slaughterhouse was running smoothly and at full capacity. Don was still the manager there, though he was not yet thirty years old. His father worked in the office downtown. Every day they met for lunch at a spot halfway between their workplaces, a meat-and-potatoes place called Neal’s Café. Mounted deer and boar heads hung on the walls, and the lunch prices were reasonable. Don and John sat alone in a booth and talked business.
From start to finish, they owned the chicken industry: from the breeding houses to the bloodlines of the best hens, from the hatchery eggs to the feed mill, and from the slaughterhouse to the shipping line. They even set the rules on the farms where the birds were grown, and they found more and more farmers willing to give away their control in return for a steady paycheck.
The machine was growing. The more money it generated, the stronger it grew. And as Don and John sat talking in Neal’s, below the trophies of other men’s hunting trips, they realized something: There was a whole world of consumers out there who rarely ate chicken but who would eat it when they realized how cheap it could be. Chicken was selling out at every grocery store that the Tysons took on as a customer. It seemed like the demand was bottomless, and now the Tysons had the means to deliver.
Making this machine wasn’t the end of the process. It was just the beginning.
* * *
1. In Jefferson’s time, citizenship was afforded only to white men, of course. But that combustible idea of inalienable rights to land and voting would later be redefined to include a broader portion of the citizenry.
2. Again, this was largely restricted to white citizens, making it more like an agrarian-democratic country club. Suffice it to say, the system worked for those who had access to it.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
Expand or Expire
(1960–1967)
HASKELL JACKSON, a college-trained accountant, was dressed like a factory worker when he showed up for his first day on the job at Tyson Feed and Hatchery. This was a curious turn of events for Haskell, who had spent the last four years of his life wearing a coat and tie to work every day as an accountant with the Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Jackson’s new job with Tyson was certainly a step up professionally. But there he stood on August 20, 1960, on the sidewalk outside a two-story redbrick building dressed in matching khaki pants and shirt, with his name stitched across the shirt’s front pocket in red lettering, like he was a janitor or slaughterhouse worker. This uniform, he had been told in no uncertain terms, was the standard dress code at Tyson. And the dress code even applied to him, the company’s new office manager and chief accountant.
The khaki uniform was the eccentricity of the company’s young president, Don Tyson, who ran the company with his dad, John. Don also wore the khaki uniform, dressing identically to the employees who worked in the hatchery and slaughterhouse he owned.
The Tyson Feed and Hatchery offices were located in a nondescript building on the east end of Emma Street, the strip of shops and offices that ran through downtown Springdale. The building was at the tail end of the town’s main drag, down by the railroad tracks and away from the center of town. That was probably for the best, because the company’s hatchery was located directly behind its offices, and the hatchery exuded the kind of stench of which the chamber of commerce would not approve. It was an odd place for Jackson to end up as an accountant, but he felt like it was his best option at the time. He had grown up in Arkansas, and his wife had been after him for years to move back home to his home state. Finally, his mother-in-law had told him about the job opening at the hatchery in Springdale, and he had interviewed there just to keep the peace in his family.
The interviews had gone well and eventually he met Don Tyson, who quizzed him about his accounting experience. Jackson asked Don just what exactly his job description would be if he moved to Arkansas.
— Hell, I don’t know. My accountant just tells me I need a full-time accountant, Don said.
Don’s “accountant” at the time was a full-time auditor out of Little Rock who kept the company’s books. After years of rapid growth, the auditor, Harry Erwin, told Don that if he was going to keep expanding the company as he wanted to, Don would need an in-house accountant to keep up with the books.
Jackson walked into the office on his first day and went upstairs to the bookkeeping department. As he stood in the little office toward the front of the building, he started to have his doubts. The room was a busy mess of bookkeepers and piles of paper, and his desk was out in the open, in the middle of the chaos. The days of having an office to himself were over. All around him, a team of ten clerks was busy tallying the company’s receipts and invoices to farmers. Jackson realized the company’s books hadn’t been reconciled since April 30, four months before, and the end of the fiscal year was at the end of September. That meant he had just a little more than a month to straighten out the paperwork and figure out if Tyson was losing or making money. So he settled into a routine of twelve-hour workdays and long weekends at the office straightening out the company’s paper trail.
Jackson was accustomed to hard work. The oldest of four children, he’d bee
n raised by his parents in a three-room wooden house with no running water or electricity on a hillside homestead in rural Madison County, just east of Springdale. Jackson’s father called the place a “farm,” though it was little more than a patch of soil and a shack. Jackson’s dad tried his hand at growing different cash crops, but he preferred heavy drinking to hard labor and none of his farming ventures ever yielded much money. Jackson moved away young and earned his accounting degree from the University of Arkansas in nearby Fayetteville. Jackson’s linear mind took naturally to the profession, the orderly arrangement of numbers and the reconciliation of expenses and income. He also had a remarkable memory for dates, numbers, and facts, which made him a natural at tracking the various moving pieces of a large business.
As he settled into work at Tyson, Jackson discovered the definition of organized chaos. There weren’t even generally accepted procedures for accounting in the poultry industry. As Jackson researched the industry, he found only one slim pamphlet that discussed how to account for operations at a vertically integrated chicken company. The business was simply too new to have well-defined practices. Like everyone else at Tyson, Jackson found himself making up new rules as he went along and building the foundation for a new industry in his wake. As luck would have it, the new industry was arising at the perfect moment in history. American dining habits were fundamentally shifting, opening the door to a new era of poultry production.
* * *
By the early 1960s, Americans were in a hurry. Women were entering the workforce in ever-larger numbers, and families were starting to redefine the way they ate. The family dinner as they knew it was quickly becoming a relic of the past, with a set table and roasted chicken increasingly relegated to the nostalgic paintings of Norman Rockwell. For the first time, Americans began to demand two things from their food: that it be cheap, and quick to prepare. A bird that used to be reserved for Sunday dinners was getting so inexpensive that it began to be used as lunch meat. With every passing year, Americans traded other foods for chicken, eating more of it rather than spending money on beef or taking time to make a salad. The economics of chicken made the trade-off all but inevitable.
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