Kansas community fights becoming a ‘chicken town’ and wins
When Shannon Reischman takes in the sweeping view from the big hill behind her in-laws’ farmhouse outside the northeastern Kansas town of Tonganoxie, she sees a rural oasis that’s an easy commute to Kansas City-area jobs.
Tyson Foods Inc. looked at the bedroom community of about 5,300 people and saw a good place to build a $320 million chicken-processing plant. And when the Springdale, Arkansas-based agribusiness giant announced its plans in early September, residents like Reischman were quick to mobilize. But they weren’t on social media to court the company. They used their posts to organize protests to drive Tyson away.
Two weeks after the announcement, local officials withdrew their support and Tyson started looking elsewhere.
Industry and state officials are a bit mystified that any community would turn away 1,600 jobs. Kansas is still trying to attract the plant, but in another town.
“We don’t want to be a chicken town,” said Reischman, a 36-year-old mother of four
who lives on a 10-acre farm.
She and her neighbours see their already growing community as economically stable enough. They didn’t want it overcome by environmental problems, newly crowded schools and heavy truck traffic.
Reischman said she was sure that from the big hill with the countryside view, her family would be able to smell the Tyson operation, but, “That’s honestly the least of our concerns.”
The lesson for Tyson, state officials and the meat-processing industry was that they haven’t been active enough in recent years in defending the industry and the economic benefits of value-added agricultural development. They said the internet gives opponents of projects easy access to negative information and an ability to spread it much more quickly than in the past.
“Oftentimes, we allow the activists to dictate the playing field, and then we kind of react to it,” said Chris Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors.
Tyson says it’s looking to build its first chicken-processing plant in more than 20 years to keep up with consumer demand. Company and state officials believed thousands of workers in the area would find the starting pay of $13 to $15 an hour attractive and say critics are overstating the potential environmental and community problems.
While Tyson doesn’t have a chicken-processing plant in Kansas, it has operations in six communities in the state with about 5,700 workers. They include a distribution centre in Olathe and a food-processing plant in Kansas City, Kansas, both within 30 miles (48 kilometres) of Tonganoxie.
Tonganoxie’s opposition followed similar resistance last year to a proposed Prestage Farms hog-processing plant in Mason City in north-central Iowa, and a Lincoln Premium Poultry chicken-processing plant in Nickerson, Nebraska, outside Omaha. In those cases, each company chose a new location in the same region after resident protests.
A big part of the problem in Tonganoxie was the secrecy surrounding Tyson’s plans, which bred skepticism and increased residents’ anger. Reischman and others said they found out about the project on TV the night before the announcement.
Tyson and state and local officials had been quietly working together for weeks on what was code-named “Project Sunset.” State Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Heather Lansdowne said state officials assumed that local leaders being receptive to the project reflected residents’ view.
Gov. Sam Brownback and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer were involved in efforts to attract the plant to Kansas at least by mid-june, their office calendars show.
Tonganoxie-area resident Jen Peak, a leader of the anti-tyson group, questioned whether Tyson and state officials grasped that the community is economically strong enough to be selective about development.
It is home to an orthopedic shoe manufacturer, a firm that helps develop medical devices and an outdoor paving-stone maker.
“The entire community was just underestimated,” the 40-year-old Peak said. “I guess this is a lesson to them, going forward, to know the area that you’re trying to move into.”