date, the Delmarva ascendancy had been dashed by its own success: The
War Food Administration had closed the northeastern market and made
the federal government principal buyer of poultry, for the armed services.
Later, peninsula producers would recover, albeit in a different structure,
but in the meantime, lower South entrepreneurs made their move.
Among them the most daring was Jesse Dixon Jewell, a modest fertilizer
and feed dealer in Gainesville, Georgia. Like Atlanta farm supply men, Jew-
ell and some Gainesville banker associates had been promoting broilers
among marginal farmers in northern Georgia for years. Then in Jewell
introduced a plan to integrate broiler production vertically. Four years later
he owned a large hatchery; distributed chicks, feed, and medicine to con-
tracted farmers in several counties; and collected the broilers after about
two months, paying the farmers for their time—minus the costs of bid-
dies, chicken feed, and medication. Jewell also owned his own processing
(or ‘‘disassembly’’) plant, where the birds were killed, plucked, eviscerated,
portioned, and packaged. Packages of chicken (whole as well as parts) were
then trucked down to Atlanta distributors. In Jewell decided to sell all
his chicken frozen, providing more flexibility and security in distribution—
that is, shelf life.
Jewell became wealthy and famous as the first significant integrator.
He owned and controlled his product virtually from egg to dinner table,
and he inspired other integrators across the South: John Tyson of Tyson
Foods and Harold Snyder of Arkansas Valley Feed in northwestern Arkan-
sas, and a small group of entrepreneurs who founded Holly Farms in Wilkes
County, North Carolina. Perdue Farms, a family corporation (like Tyson’s),
finally integrated vertically the old chicken business of the Delmarva Penin-
sula. Chicken became cheap, tasty meat for any day, every day, whether the
preacher was coming or not. But at what a price.
First, today as fifty years ago, the presence of chicken farms almost in-
variably signifies a countryside’s economic subjugation and dependency
on powerful corporate entities. At first ‘‘chicken farming’’ had seemed a
blessing. Cotton culture was moving west, and rural landowners occupying
uncompetitive ground—especially on the fringes of the Appalachians and
Ozarks and on coastal plains—were eager to work for guaranteed cash. But
soon contracting with the integrators evolved into something else. In the
early years, Jesse Jewell himself drove around and inspected the progress of
his chicks, renewing ties with country people. As his business grew, though,
he was obliged to hire inspectors. In a short time these men (and their
counterparts in other companies) became de facto bosses to supposedly