to head the state department of agriculture’s new swine division in Raleigh.
Shay himself was an experienced midwestern hog breeder. He and his wife
moved to a western Carolina mountaintop after they were diagnosed as
tubercular. (Mountains, we will recall, allegedly promote health as well
as wisdom—rather the opposite of lowlands.) The Shays, natives of a re-
gional culture long devoted to purebred farm animals, systematic feeding,
sanitary penning, and careful attention to markets, were shocked at ani-
mal husbandry, southern style. In Raleigh, Shay became principal evange-
list for midwestern-style pork production, taking his commonsense Shay
Method to demonstrations throughout the state. He took a particular inter-
est in eastern counties, where there seemed no method at all to raising
hogs, and where cotton culture was weevil-infested and crumbling. Shay
readily adapted his program to the Depression-eraemphasis on self-
sufficiency: the safety-first, live-at-home premise for careful husbandry.
Thus Carolinians were gradually persuaded toward a rural business culture
that more resembled that of Iowa and Shay’s native Michigan. Later, and
again like midwesterners, once the opportunity and technology appeared,
such folk might require little persuasion to move beyond mere enclosure
to confinement, then industrial-scale confinement.
By eastern North Carolina had a state-sponsored Swine Develop-
ment Center near Rocky Mount. State officials, anticipating a growing as-
sault on tobacco use and ultimate attacks on the New Deal–era tobacco
subsidies that farmers relied on, hoped to develop a profitable alternative
in hogs. Carolina husbandry still lagged far behind the Midwest, however.
There, some farmers were already abandoning the wet, cold (or hot) out-
door work of raising pigs and turning to brilliantly designed new confine-
ment operations, where mastery was more comfortable and science was
more easily administered. The model for hog confinement was hardly for-
eign but as southern as Jesse Jewell: the chicken business, of course.
The most portentous, now-legendary, initiative in North Carolina, how-
ever, came not from government but one individual, down in Duplin
County. There, in , Wendell Murphy was a vocational agriculture
teacher at the Rose Hill high school. As such, he was a poorly paid min-
ion at the bottom of the system of modern agronomic education, founded
back in . Murphy was ambitious to be in the private sector, though,
and with his own modest savings and his father’s guarantee of a bank loan,
he bought a feed mill. Now he followed Jesse Jewell’s path by entering the
market animal business as a sideline. By Murphy had given up both
teaching and the feed mill to concentrate on hogs. At that point his method