tainly lessened animal manure’s place in the soil-improvement gospel, but
early-twentieth-century ‘‘progressive’’ agronomy treasured manure, still,
for the independence it conferred on poorer and ‘‘family’’ farmers. So when
such farmers contracted with, say, Jesse Jewell during the s, it was as-
sumed that the ton of manure accumulating with each two-month cycle of
broiler breeding would go onto the farmers’ corn and cotton fields—an-
other benefit.
In short time, though, chicken houses grew—up to yards long by the
end of the twentieth century. Even if poultry droppings had been appropri-
ate fertilizer for northern Georgia’s clay, now there was a mounting super-
fluity. Chicken farmers, already economic captives of the integrators, be-
came violators of s and s clean water legislation. Fertilizer applied
in a rainy spring almost inevitably leaches into watercourses; toxic creeks
and annual fish kills are predictable. Great dumps of chicken waste, left by
farmers or by cleanup contractors, are certain polluters. Add to this wastes
from the companies’ processing plants, too often improperly disposed of.
Tyson Foods had, by the s, become the most notorious of polluters.
The explanation lay partly in the poultry pioneer’s sheer size. Don Tyson,
son of the founder, like his father worshiped the doctrine of ‘‘grow or die,’’
and after Tyson’s acquisition of North Carolina–based Holly Farms in ,
Tyson became the largest producer and processor of poultry in the United
States. Complaints of watercourse pollution were already legend in Arkan-
sas. Now the federal Justice Department charged a Tyson processing plant
with dumping in the Missouri River. Simultaneously Tyson was infamous
for the merciless competition and cost cutting associated with what could
justly be termed a slaughterhouse labor syndrome. In Iowa, the aggres-
sive new-era meat processor,(formerly Iowa Beef Packers), had already
established a regime of recruiting desperate workers from afar—southern
black migrants, then Chicanos, Guatamalans, and even East Africans—
willing to labor under dangerous and debilitating conditions. In the South
Tyson, having exhausted local labor pools dominated by poor black women,
connected with Mexican and Central American ‘‘coyotes’’ and filled assem-
bly lines with Mesoamericans. Many of them were illegal, some were also
too young, and a few used their U.S. positions to import and deal illegal
drugs. In Tyson narrowly failed in a risky bid to buy; Tyson lost to
another southern giant, Smithfield Foods of Virginia. And notwithstanding
Tyson’s close ties in Little Rock and Washington, D.C., with both Demo-
crats and Republicans, the company was beset with indictments and fines