Poultry Business Quotes

You point your feet out too much when you walk,” Will went on. He was busy polishing an apple on his shirtfront, and appeared not to notice Tessa glaring at him. “Camille walks delicately. Like a faun in the woods. Not like a duck.” “I do not walk like a duck.” “I like ducks,” Jem observed diplomatically. “Especially the ones in Hyde Park.” He glanced sideways at Will; both boys were sitting on the edge of the high table, their legs dangling over the side. “Remember when you tried to convince me to feed poultry pie to the mallards in the park to see if you could breed a race of cannibal ducks?” “They ate it too,” Will reminisced. “Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.

Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged.

You can plead the Blood of Jesus, over any and everything; your spirit, soul and body, your house, car, work, children, spouse, business, as a form of protection or prevention against evil. You can plead the Blood of Jesus over your journey, the road, the vehicle or aircraft, etc. If you are living or passing through a dangerous zone; you can draw a bloodline of protection, therefore making a boundary, against any evil. A man had a poultry where, all of sudden, the chickens began to die. When he saw that he was going bankrupt with the loss, he cried unto the Lord, who ministered to him about drawing a bloodline around the poultry. Thus, creating a boundary that the enemy cannot cross. He walked round and drew the bloodline around the poultry that night. The following day, he found the carcass of a wolf, about two feet into the circle that he drew. It was stone dead; it had passed its bounds. Today, I pray that any, wolf assigned against your life, shall die in the Name of Jesus. Draw the Bloodline and the enemy will keep off. These are very serious matters and we should recognise and know these secrets. Recently, there have been disasters that have destroyed many lives in many countries. I was told of a man, who saw the flood raging towards his house and he came out and pleaded the Blood of Jesus. The flood obeyed him, not a single drop of water entered his house but the houses next to him, were submerged. That is the power in the Blood of Jesus!

You could see the future right away here,” Hu Renzhong, a pig and poultry producer, told me. “Food was expensive and people didn’t have enough meat to eat. They couldn’t afford it. The land was good, though, and back then it was still cheap.” Hu received me one morning at his mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka, offering me a seat in the marble chill of his enormous living room, before taking me on a long walking tour of his acres and acres of hog-breeding pens and sprawling, temperature-controlled chicken hatcheries, all impressively modern and minutely organized. He had come to Zambia from China’s Jiangxi province in 1995 as a twenty-two-year-old simple laborer, but soon got into business for himself, raising chickens at first with another Chinese immigrant. It wasn’t long before the two had struck it rich, buying land and building ever-bigger houses. “Things had started developing really fast back home, and a lot of people tried to tell me I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I’ve never really looked back.” I

Whatand why were never questions for me. How was the only question. When I look back now, I realize that I never thought about what I wanted to become in life. I only thought about how I wanted to live my life. And I knew that the “how” could only be determined within me and by me. There was a big boom in poultry farming at the time. I wanted to make some money to finance my desire for unrestrained, purposeless travel. So I got into it. My father said, “What am I going to tell people? That my son is rearing chickens?” But I built my poultry farm and I built it single-handedly, from scratch. The business took off. The profits started rolling in. I devoted four hours every morning to the business. The rest of the day was spent reading and writing poetry, swimming in the well, meditating, daydreaming on a huge banyan tree. Success made me adventurous. My father was always lamenting that everyone else’s sons had become engineers, industrialists, joined the civil service, or gone to America. And everywhere everyone I met—my friends, relatives, my old school and college teachers—said, “Oh, we thought you’d make something of your life, but you are just wasting it.” I took on the challenge. In partnership with a civil engineer friend, I entered the construction business. In five years, we became a major construction company, among the leading private

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

The bus continued on to its last stop before Bangor. In the mid-nineteenth century, Belfast became known for its production of large five-masted schooners. This was due to the abundance of tall pines in the proximity that were used as masts. There were fortunes made in shipbuilding and some of the larger homes, which are still in existence, are testimony to that. Unfortunately, this all ended with the advent of iron ships and the steam engine. Even the labor-intensive shoe manufacturing industry, which followed shipbuilding, faltered. Belfast still had its poultry business in 1952, and once a year held a popular Broiler Festival that brought in many people.

A little farther on she managed to find some zucchini she was happy with, and back in the kitchen he watched as she sorted them into two piles, one of wrist-thick vegetables with veined orange flowers at the end, the other of star-shaped open flowers. "These are pretty," he remarked, picking up one of the blooms. "They taste good too." "You eat the flowers?" he said, surprised. "Of course. We have them stuffed with mozzarella, then dipped in a little batter and fried. But only the male flowers. The female ones are too soft." "I hadn't realized," he said, taking one and tucking it behind her ear, "that flowers could be male and female. Let alone edible." "Everything is male and female. And everything is edible. You just need to remember to cook them differently." "In England we say, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." "How very stupid. A goose has a light taste, so you would cook it in a gentle white wine sauce, perhaps with a little tarragon or oregano. But a gander has a strong, gamey flavor. It needs rich tastes: red wine, perhaps, or mushrooms. It's the same with a gallina, a hen, and a pollastrello, a cock." She glanced sideways at him. "If the English try to cook a pollastrello and a gallinathe same way, it explains a lot." "Such as?" he asked, curious. But she was busy with her cooking, and only rolled her eyes at him as if the answer were too obvious to mention.

A little farther on she managed to find some zucchini she was happy with, and back in the kitchen he watched as she sorted them into two piles, one of wrist-thick vegetables with veined orange flowers at the end, the other of star-shaped open flowers. "These are pretty," he remarked, picking up one of the blooms. "They taste good too." "You eat the flowers?" he said, surprised. "Of course. We have them stuffed with mozzarella, then dipped in a little batter and fried. But only the male flowers. The female ones are too soft." "I hadn't realized," he said, taking one and tucking it behind her ear, "that flowers could be male and female. Let alone edible." "Everything is male and female. And everything is edible. You just need to remember to cook them differently." "In England we say, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." "How very stupid. A goose has a light taste, so you would cook it in a gentle white wine sauce, perhaps with a little tarragon or oregano. But a gander has a strong, gamey flavor. It needs rich tastes: red wine, perhaps, or mushrooms. It's the same with a gallina, a hen, and a pollastrello, a cock." She glanced sideways at him. "If the English try to cook a pollastrello and a gallina the same way, it explains a lot." "Such as?" he asked, curious. But she was busy with her cooking, and only rolled her eyes at him as if the answer were too obvious to mention.

Expand your egg business through latest technologies In India, poultry farming is still lagging behind in terms of infrastructure, skilled manpower and resources. Government has tried to overcome troubles but still egg farm owners in semi-urban or rural areas aren’t utilized technologies due to lack of knowledge and training. On the contrary, farmers in foreign countries develop smart egg processed plant to produce better quality eggs. Technologies are playing keen role to expand egg business sector. Indian farmers should be trained on modern-day technologies to increase productivity. Fast-growing population demanded delicious egg dishes, thus people who are interested to run a restaurant probably sell eggs. Here also you can use technology to develop effective management system, inventory solutions and check product quality as well. It goes without saying that egg industry encompasses varies business categories but you should involve technology to make most advantage and profits. There is trend among foreign countries to cut down cost on unnecessary labours thus they are concentrating on emerging technologies.

Food animals also get antibiotics for “growth promotion,” a metabolically mysterious process that has made possible the entire high-volume, low-margin business of industrial-scale farming. Since the 1950s, when two pharma company scientists discovered that feeding chicks the waste products from drug manufacturing made them put on weight much faster, many U.S. farmers have been giving tiny doses of antibiotics to cattle, swine, and poultry.34

Winnie and Big Leo Chao were serving scallion pancakes decades before you could find them outside of a home kitchen. Leo, thirty-five years ago, winning his first poker game against the owners of a local poultry farm, exchanged his chips for birds that Winnie transformed into the shining, chestnut-colored duck dishes of far-off cities. Dear Winnie, rolling out her bing the homemade way, two pats of dough together with a seal of oil in between, letting them rise to a steaming bubble in the piping pan. Leo, bargaining for hard-to-get ingredients; Winnie subbing wax beans for yard-long beans, plus home-growing the garlic greens, chives, and hot peppers you used to never find in Haven. Their garden giving off a glorious smell.

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.

Big meat companies like Tyson had a critical advantage on their side in the argument over how to restructure the nation’s food system. Their advantage was that they represented the status quo. It is far easier for a business to revolutionize an industry than it is for regulators to go back in and tinker with the gears of production, hoping to benefit the public. Iowa attorney general Tom Miller and his lieutenant Eric Tabor were able to impose new ground rules on industrial hog production because they intervened when the industry was still evolving. They acted when farmers were building the first confinement hog houses and signing their first contracts with integrators. The story was different for the entrenched southern poultry industry. It had been tightly integrated going back to the 1950s and 1960s. To impose similar rules on that business would mean destroying existing relationships and replacing them with a government-prescribed alternative. In the face of such actions, companies can argue convincingly that the government is experimenting in a field of worrisome unknowns.

To shape the debate, meat company lobbyists used an increasingly common tactic in the Washington influence industry. They stoked a “grassroots” movement of ordinary people who contacted lawmakers to voice complaints and make suggestions that perfectly mirror the wishes of big business. In the meat business, of course, there was no more effective group to enlist for such an effort than farmers themselves. If farmers opposed GIPSA’s efforts, it was hard to justify them. On August 4, 2010, the National Chicken Council sent out a confidential memo to poultry companies like Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride. The memo urged the companies to contact their farmers and ask them to oppose the GIPSA rule by sending comments to the agency.

Heffernan’s research was based in the rural area of Union Parish in Louisiana, where a booming poultry industry was expanding in the 1960s. Vertically integrated poultry production was still a radical concept back then, and Heffernan wanted to study it. So he undertook an effort that no one else seems to have duplicated. He went door to door, made phone calls, and drove hundreds of miles between farms. He surveyed farmers and documented their income and their debt. Crucially, he followed up with farmers in Union Parish every ten years until the turn of the century, building a dataset that was forty years deep. But Heffernan did something more than ask about money. He did something most agricultural economists never thought of doing: He asked the farmers how they felt. He asked them, decade after decade, how much they trusted the companies they worked for and how well they were treated. In doing this, Heffernan assembled a picture that most economists missed. He tracked the relationship between the powerful and the powerless.

Don Tyson saw something special as he looked over the balance sheets of his small network of experimental hog farms. He saw a possible new future for his company, one that made it less vulnerable to the brutal swings of the poultry market. Tyson Foods could raise pigs without spending too much money, and it made a decent profit when it sold them to meatpackers like Armour. Tyson realized that pork prices rose and fell on a completely different cycle than chicken prices. If Tyson kept growing hogs, it might buffer the company from chicken’s permanent boom and bust pricing cycles. The hog barns could be an insurance policy of sorts, a hedge against the volatility that drove modern chicken companies out of business.

The costs for Meyerhoeffer and his neighbors to get into the poultry business were almost prohibitive. Doing some quick calculations, Meyerhoeffer realized the group would need somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million just to take over the plant and keep it running. They would need to buy feed and eggs for the hatchery. They’d have to meet payroll at the slaughterhouse and the feed mill.2 Somehow, in a matter of six short months, Meyerhoeffer and his fellow farmers overcame these barriers and created the Virginia Poultry Growers Cooperative.

At that time, private banks started getting edgy about loaning money to poultry farms. The business was getting riskier, even as it was expanding and companies like Tyson were reaping record profits each year. In spite of the growth, more farmers were going under and selling their operations at a loss to get out of the business. It seemed increasingly routine for Tyson to cancel a farmer’s contract if he didn’t meet the company’s expectations. But the rate of chicken house construction didn’t slow, because bankers figured out a new way to keep money flowing to Tyson’s network of contract farms. They turned to the Farm Service Agency. While the agency was limited in how much money it could loan directly to farmers, it had far more leeway in the size of the loan it could guarantee. Under the guaranteed loan program, the FSA would pay back the bank more than 90 percent of the loan value if a farmer defaulted. The bank also got to keep any down payment the farmer made, plus any fees, interest payments, and other money it collected from the farmer before he went bankrupt. This meant the bank had nothing to lose if it could land an FSA guarantee for a poultry farm. One bank after another discovered this lucrative pool of taxpayer-backed loans, first regional banks in towns like Danville and Fort Smith, Arkansas, then national operations like U.S. Bank.

Baker didn’t need much convincing. He was a cattleman and banker from central Arkansas who favored wearing a cowboy hat even in Washington, D.C. He was familiar with the poultry industry and big meatpacking companies, and he tended to think they operated best when left alone. Government rules just impeded the natural functioning of the market. Tabor’s efforts in Iowa, and the parallel efforts in Washington, D.C., and other states, were a bridge too far for Baker. “Don’t get away from the free enterprise system,” Baker said later about Tabor’s speech. “You start infringing on it with regulations like that.

feces. If a wild bird infects a chicken on a poultry farm, the virus may get opportunities to interact with a range of additional viruses through close contact with pigs and other animals. This is indeed what has happened in the live animal markets and backyard farms of China and southern Asia. Influenza viruses are notorious for their ability to change, through a combination of mutation and “reassortment”—a borrowing of genes from other viruses. An open farm acts like a virus convention, where different strains swap genetic material like conventioneers swap business cards.

The civil rights clashes of the 1950s and '60s came and went without changing much in the lives of Forsyth's quiet country people, who in the decades after World War II had been busy erecting chicken houses in their old corn and cotton fields, as America's expanding poultry industry brought new prosperity to north Georgia. The county seat may have been just a short drive from Ebenezer Baptist - the home church of Martin Luther King Jr. and one of the epicenters of the American civil rights movement - but with no blacks residents to segregate from whites, there were no 'colored' drinking fountains in the Cumming courthouse, and no 'whites only' signs in the windows of Cumming's diners and roadside motels. Instead, as segregationists all over the South faced off against freedom riders, civil rights marches, and lunch-counter sit-ins, Forsyth was a bastion of white supremacy that went almost totally unnoticed.

So ask him. He could round up every goose in Manhattan before we could even figure out where Sam’s parents live now.” Wolf looked blank. “Uh…kosher poultry?” Sacha prompted. “Litvaks?” Now Wolf and Lily were both staring at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “Okay, all the big Jewish gangsters either come from Latvia or Galitzia. Ever since anyone can remember, the Galitzians ran the numbers rackets, and the Litvaks—that’s Minsky and Magic, Inc.—ran the kosher poultry business.” “I take it there’s big money in kosher poultry?” Wolf asked, with a bemused look on his face. “Well, I don’t know about that. But right around the time Minsky took over Magic, Inc., the Litvaks took over the numbers runners too.” “And what happened to the Galitzians?” Lily asked. Sacha grinned wickedly. “We don’t talk about that.

Different people in the poultry business took different lessons from the crisis of 1961. For Charles Garrett, the lesson was clear: It was time to get the hell out of the chicken business. Garrett owned Garrett Poultry in Rogers, Arkansas, near Tyson’s headquarters in Springdale. He had survived the storm of 1961 in large part because he had imitated Tyson’s model. Garrett Poultry was a wholly integrated company, with a slaughterhouse, feed mill, and hatchery bundled into the business. But Garrett didn’t share Don Tyson’s stomach for risk. The poultry crisis showed that for all the money Garrett invested in his infrastructure and equipment, his livelihood was as risky as a stock market speculator’s. He wanted to sell his assets, take the cash, and use the money for something more stable.

Don Tyson patiently explained his strategy. Getting bigger would help Tyson survive. The bigger a company was, the more it could drive down its costs. It gained efficiency through its size, using fewer managers to operate bigger slaughterhouses, for example, or buying feed in bulk. It was easier to be more efficient than the next guy if you were bigger than they were. That meant you could outlast them when the poultry business inevitably went underwater. Tyson couldn’t get bigger just by adding more farms or slaughterhouses. If the company expanded its own operations, it would put more chickens on the market, inevitably leading to oversupply. But buying a competitor neatly solved two problems with one move. Tyson could expand, and it could expand without boosting the overall supply of chicken. Tyson simply bought out its competitor’s market share, without adding one bird to the market. It was part of Don Tyson’s new strategy, called “Expand or Expire.

Jim Blair helped Tyson fight the complaint. And he learned from the experience. Tyson fought the USDA in a fashion that would come to define much of its legal strategy in coming decades. The company was aggressive, admitted no guilt, and was legally creative enough to look like it knew federal law better than the regulators. Tyson responded to the USDA complaint by suing the agency in federal court. Rather than fight the charges head-on, the company made a novel argument, claiming that strong penalties under the Packers and Stockyards Act didn’t apply to Tyson because it wasn’t technically a meatpacker. It was a poultry company.

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.

Don Tyson spent a lot of time with bankers. After secretly borrowing $80,000, he had finally convinced his father that taking credit from bankers wouldn’t bring doom to the company. As John grew more comfortable with borrowing, Don traveled throughout Missouri and Arkansas, building relationships with bankers who were increasingly interested in investing in the new business of poultry production. Don discovered a new source of credit that had been overlooked by many of his competitors, in the form of a sleepy federal agency called the Farm Credit Administration.

When Tyson bought Valmac, it also bought the services of that company’s young head of operations, David Purtle. He was a man who spent his career in the poultry business, and he had almost a gut instinct about the way it worked. Within two years, Tyson promoted him to head of operations for the entire company. Purtle’s job was to make sure all of Tyson’s complexes ran as efficiently as possible. If one complex spent more money to raise chickens than another, he had to know why, and how to fix it. But one thing made this hard to do. Even into the 1990s, each Tyson complex operated with a certain level of autonomy. Through its chain of acquisitions, Tyson Foods had stitched together a constellation of poultry plants with different management teams, making different products and raising different sizes of birds. It was nearly impossible to measure their efficiency because each complex had the freedom to choose what formula of feed it gave its farmers. Complex managers had their own special recipes, winning formulas they were convinced put the most meat on a bird’s bones. That made it hard for Purtle to figure out which managers were running a more efficient ship. Whenever he tried to judge their operations, they always blamed the feed mixes for the results. Purtle put an end to it. He standardized the feed formulas that all of Tyson’s plants used.

Using cash-basis accounting, Jackson could easily make it look like the corporation suffered massive losses each year. Poultry Growers Inc. paid up front for its feed, fuel, and other farm expenses. Because Tyson sold its birds with long-term contracts to grocery stores and restaurant chains, it could delay reporting its income into the next tax period, when cash from the contracts rolled in. Hypothetically, the company could kick the can of taxable income down the road for years.1 While Tyson couldn’t escape paying taxes altogether, it could reduce its payments substantially. In Jackson’s view, the income tax ploy basically let Tyson take an interest-free loan from taxpayers. By putting off its tax payments, Tyson could put its money to work by investing it in new equipment or more workers. The plan worked, but it was hell on Jackson. After carefully orchestrating Tyson’s cost codes and accounting for all the company’s transactions, Jackson had to translate all the numbers into a different accounting basis. When it came time to pay taxes, he submitted these books to the IRS. When Tyson went to banks to borrow more money, Jackson had the other books on hand, the ones that used accrual-basis accounting. Presumably, all of this was legal. By 1985, Tyson’s Foods had avoided paying $26.5 million in annual taxes through the cash-basis loophole, according to a report written by two economists with the U.S. General Accounting Office.

Jim Blair didn’t want to raise unnecessary attention. The Fayetteville attorney made a few discreet phone calls, worked some personal connections, and quietly arranged to buy a $10 million bond note that was owned by the investment firm Stephens Inc., in Little Rock. A bond note is a form of corporate debt, and in this case the $10 million in debt had been borrowed by Clift Lane, a poultry magnate from central Arkansas. In all likelihood, Stephens was more than happy to unload the debt at that point, in the early 1980s. Lane was looking like a shakier borrower by the day as his company foundered, due to weak sales and high interest payments. Lane almost certainly had no idea that Blair was buying up his debt, but he would find out soon enough. Blair handed over the note to his biggest client, and Lane’s most hated rival, Don Tyson. Tyson had cajoled Blair into becoming general counsel for Tyson’s Foods, a high-pressure job Blair was hesitant to take. He didn’t need the money, having become independently wealthy by 1980 from a series of shrewd stock investments. In spite of his personal wealth, he found himself working far more than he wanted to on the Tyson account. Blair had a job that was never done, and to call him Tyson’s general counsel was to miss his larger role at the company. He didn’t just handle lawsuits or regulatory matters. He was more like a well-trained attack dog, with a deep and creative understanding of U.S. law. Don Tyson kept him on a short leash.

Valmac was among the best companies in the industry, but Lane had made a serious miscalculation when he borrowed millions to expand. The poultry down cycle lasted longer than he thought, and Lane was having a hard time paying off the debt. Don Tyson, having followed his father’s strict rules for limiting debt during the upswing, was ready to buy Lane out.

The agency wasn’t heavily involved in the poultry business, but Don Tyson helped change that. Tyson met with Farm Credit agents and explained to them the new business of industrial chicken farming. The system evened out the wild risks that had characterized the early days of the poultry industry. A farmer growing birds for Tyson could show the Farm Credit Administration a reliable long-range prediction of cash flow and sales, regardless of the season. Perhaps most important, Tyson provided a letter of intent to the lenders, assuring them it would deliver a steady flow of chickens to make the farm profitable. Production wasn’t tied to weather events or the grain markets. It was tied only to Tyson marketing arrangements and contracts. The predictability made it a safe haven for the taxpayer’s money. The Farm Credit Administration was convinced

As Tyson went on its buying spree, the company shaped the modern chicken industry into what it is today: a highly concentrated business controlled by four companies. By the mid-1990s, Tyson controlled about 25 percent of the U.S. chicken market and competed against just a handful of giant companies that controlled the rest. The top four chicken producers controlled over half the U.S. poultry business, supplying massive volumes of meat to the biggest national grocery chains and restaurants, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The remainder of the market was controlled by smaller versions of Tyson, vertically integrated companies that were still enormous by historical standards. By 1992, 88 percent of all chicken in the United States was produced in the kind of large, heavily mechanized slaughterhouse that Don Tyson built in Springdale. In 1967, by contrast, just 29 percent of chickens came from big processing plants.

Tyson first pioneered this model in the poultry business. Then the company expanded into raising hogs. Within two short decades America’s independent hog industry was wiped out and replaced with a vertically integrated, corporate-controlled model. Ninety percent of all hog farms disappeared. The amount of money spent at grocery stores went up, but the amount of money farmers received went down. Companies like Tyson keep much of the difference.

Saad Jalal -Healthy eating refers to the practice of consuming a balanced and nutritious diet that provides the body with the essential nutrients it needs to function optimally. It involves making food choices that promote overall health and well-being while reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Here are some key principles and aspects of healthy eating: Balanced Diet: A healthy diet should include a variety of foods from all food groups. This typically includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins (such as poultry, fish, beans, and tofu), and dairy or dairy alternatives. Balance is essential to ensure that your body receives a wide range of nutrients. Portion Control: Eating the right portion sizes is crucial for maintaining a healthy weight. Overeating, even healthy foods, can lead to weight gain. Learning to recognize appropriate portion sizes can help control calorie intake. Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - Limit Processed Foods: Processed and ultra-processed foods often contain high levels of added sugars, unhealthy fats, and sodium. Reducing the consumption of these foods can improve overall health. Opt for fresh, whole foods whenever possible.

Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....

The Ultimate Guide to Poultry Cartons: Choosing the Best Egg Packaging Introduction Proper packaging of eggs serves as a necessity for maintaining food safety during both shipping and storage because eggs represent a highly sensitive food item. Poultry cartons support the preservation of both egg quality and their freshness aspect. Every type of business operating in the poultry industry needs to choose appropriate egg cartons. A steady egg carton supply alongside cost savings benefits any business that buys cartons in bulk format. Guide to Poultry Cartons provides exhaustive knowledge about these boxes along with explanation of their types while presenting advantages and selection process for each type.