(By Christopher Leonard, Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $28.)
Reviewed by Jules Wagman
Have you checked the price of meat lately? It’s going up? They’re making a lot of money, you say? Who’s “They?”
It’s not the farmer. He’s being squeezed by what is pretty close to a cartel: companies that control the production of chicken, pork and beef and who get rid of bottom producers.
The companies are well known: Tyson Foods, Cargill, Smithfield and JBS Swift. Among them, they control 85 percent of the national beef market and 65 percent of the pork market. In the chicken business, Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride control “almost half of the U.S. chicken supply,” writes agribusiness reporter Christopher Leonard.
It all makes for a pungent kettle of fish—but when Tyson made a run at seafood by buying Arctic Alaska Fisheries, it lost $20 million in the 1990s.
Leonard is a former national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. His work has appeared in Fortune, Slate and The New York Times.
The Great Depression of the 1930s destroyed the Tyson family farm in Missouri and forced young John and his wife to leave with a truck and half a bale of hay. That was all his dad could give them as they headed for Fort Smith, Ark., where he heard there was work. In Fort Smith, he barely made ends meet delivering local fruits to Kansas City and St. Louis.
In the winter, farmers shipped their chickens. As the orchards disappeared, Tyson hauled more and more chickens. By the late ‘30s, he was delivering to Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis. He saw opportunity in the feed business and added that line. The chicken business was volatile and Tyson wanted full control, from hatchery to slaughterhouse to market.
He learned the best way to do that was to put farmers under contract. Pay them a set price to raise his chicks with feed that he sold them. If the chickens gained enough weight fast enough and the death rate was low enough, the farmers made money.
That was how the vertical integration of raising chicken began. Then competition was added. Farmers were put in groups known only to Tyson. Those who more efficient got the better chicks and feed. The less efficient farmers struggled until they dropped out or went bankrupt. They might as well have been on an accelerating treadmill.
Tyson sewed up the chicken market in Arkansas and Missouri, then expanded by buying competitors. Chicken went from being a luxury meat in the ‘20s—Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken in every pot” alluded to higher incomes—to replacing beef as the biggest meat product.
Tyson tried the same thing in the hog and cattle markets. It was not as easy, but the system worked there, too, and Tyson is today a multi- billion-dollar corporation, whose meat, chicken, beef or pork we eat every day, especially McDonald’s McNuggets.
Leonard goes into great detail explaining how chickens went from being a farm product to becoming a commodity. He does the same in an abbreviated manner for beef and pork.
In the whole process, he neglects to say who owns the rooster, bull or boar. To this old farm editor, artificial insemination from prizewinning males fertilizes many more first-class animals than the old-fashioned way and that was the key to improving the breed: bigger chicken breasts, better marbleized steaks, meatier hams.
Jules Wagman’s first newspaper job was farm editor of the semi-weekly Montpelier (Ohio) Leader-Enterprise.
©2014 by Jules L. Wagman
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