Industry: Chicken Fat

The mass-produced U.S. chicken that has made headlines by being kept out of Europe has also been making history of a sort down on the farm. This year the U.S. will produce a record of more than 2 billion chickens, enough to put two chickens in the pot of every family in the world. Today’s chicken growers are more industrialists than mere farmers, and they preside over a $3.5 billion-a-year business. They have learned the lessons of automation and cost controls so well that they now run one of the nation’s most efficient industries.

Short, Climate-Controlled Life. U.S. farmers produce a 31-lb. chicken in nine weeks with 8 Ibs. of feed—which is one-third less time and half as much feed as it took a few years ago. Mother hens set in climate-controlled rows while separate conveyor belts carry away their droppings and their eggs (average per hen: 200 fertilized eggs yearly). Automatic incubators coddle more than 50,000 eggs at a time, radioactive isotopes trace what goes on inside chickens to find better nutrients, and each chick is vigorously hormonized, vitaminized (A, B, D, E, K) and de-beaked so as not to peck at any other birds during its short life.

Most chickens are grown by such large companies as Ralston Purina or by co-ops of dozens of growers. But modern methods have enabled individual growers to become big. The richest and one of the biggest independent growers in the U.S. is balding Bennie Clyde Rogers, 58, of Morton, Miss., who has 6,000,000 birds under his wing and boasts that last year his several businesses grossed $40 million. Rogers started as a feed salesman, swapping his Purina chicken feed for eggs from hard-pressed farmers during the Depression and piling up wealth with dried eggs during World War II. Today he raises 1,000,000 chicks on his own land, and, like most big growers, farms out the rest (to 220 contract farmers). The farmers get free feed from Rogers and are paid 1½¢ to 2¢ a Ib. to provide chicken houses, land, water and electricity until the birds are ready for slaughter.

Then, hung up by their feet on moving belts in Rogers’ processing plant, the chickens are eviscerated at the rate of 208 a minute, and delivered around the U.S. in 144 Rogers trucks that are gassed up by the Rogers Oil Co. “Most everything in town I’ve got my mark on,” says Bennie Rogers, who also chairs Morton’s only bank, owns its main stores and has 1,000 head of cattle grazing on 3,500 Mississippi acres that are enriched by fertilizer from his chickens. Rogers lives in a 25-room house and trades in his white, air-conditioned Cadillac for a new model every year; but he is concerned over sales because the Common Market’s recent high tariff rise has cut his exports from 250,000 Ibs. to 15,000 Ibs. a month. Complains Rogers: “We taught them how to fry chicken, and now they stab us in the back.”

More Beef. Exports accounted for less than 4% of U.S. chicken sales last year, but the slightest cutback causes trouble because domestic markets are already glutted. In the past decade, as U.S. chicken production more than doubled, prices have fallen from 280 per Ib. to 140. Even so, mass production methods enable the big growers to make a profit at as low as 130 per Ib. The growers now hope to increase sales in Japan and Africa—and also see room for expansion at home. Chicken-eating in the U.S. has increased tenfold since 1940 but growers point out that Americans eat only 30 Ibs. a year on the average v. 89 Ibs. of beef.