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This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.
Like most big companies located in small towns, Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN) has a delightfully quirky origin. John Tyson, owner of a battered truck and 500 chickens, opportunist, and debtor in the Depression-era 1930s struck an idea that probably seemed like folly to his neighbors: he'd deliver chickens to Chicago and Kansas City, where they'd get more money.
I'm sure for every story like Tyson's, there were 100 that didn't turn out so auspiciously. But in this tale, the hero comes back to his little Arkansas hometown with a profit and pays off his debts. He keeps on raising and selling birds in points north, eventually devising a plan to keep more of the profits by "vertically integrating" (I'll bet dollars-to-doughnuts he didn't call it that) and incubating his own chicks instead of buying them from a hatchery, as well as milling his own feed instead of buying it from a feed store.
This wasn't the end of Tyson's forethought. He bought a broiler farm in Springdale, Arkansas (beginning the company's history in that town) and started to cross-breed birds designed for meat production, instead of using heritage (or "pedigree") breeds.
While those committed to sustainable farming practices would later curse Tyson's innovations, his competitors were impressed and soon moved their slaughter operations to Arkansas to take advantage of the supply of cheap, quickly-growing birds. It was his son, Don Tyson, in 1950 who would convince Tyson to build a processing plant in Springdale, and in the 1960s the company moved into commercial egg production.
By the 1980s, Tyson had established international poultry partnership with Mexico and Japan and was processing beef and pork, as well, though it eventually focused back in on its core chicken products. Today 42.5 million chickens a week are processed by Tyson (along with 170,938 cows and 347,891 pigs).
Although Tyson Foods has had a spotty record in many of the small towns and cities where the company owns processing plants and farms, battling lawsuits and outcry for everything from racism to pollution, the history with Springdale, Arkansas, seems positively bucolic. Certainly, many thousands of the city's 60,000 residents are employed by the company, or work for contract farms in the area, and the town has been titled "The Chicken Capital of the World" and is colloquially called "Chickendale." Tyson management (including both Don and John) keep cozy with the Bible Belt locals by allowing prayer in the company cafeterias, encouraging faith through table-tents, and occasionally making fervent public statements of repentance. John even publicly acknowledged his battles with alcohol and drug addiction in 2005, though he didn't repent for his chickens' antibiotics habit.
Somehow, a company who has struggled mightily against the varied criticisms of commercial meat producers has kept its hometown relations civil, even jolly; an impressive achievement, indeed.
Be sure to check out more Big Company, Small Town posts.
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