Tyson closings

This fix won’t be easy

This sounds like a job for Super Governor. Or at least her emergency/crisis economic team. We’re not sure if most of our readers understand how big a deal that Tyson news was last week. As somebody said in one of the stories, those folks who lost their 9-to-5 jobs make for sad enough news. But how’d you like to be a farmer that (maybe recently) signed his name to a million-dollar loan to either build chicken houses or vastly improve them to meet Tyson’s standards? Then have your contract taken away.

Those who’ve worked in chicken houses (and many an Arkansan has) know it to be brutal, nasty, 24-hour work. But it’s also an extremely worrying business for contract farmers who own the houses, and the bank loans that go with them.

What if a disease wipes out a flock? What if a storm knocks out the electricity at 1 a.m. and the generator doesn’t kick in? What if a wild animal rips a hole in the curtain and starts its own slaughterhouse right there? The people who own chicken houses in Arkansas—and there are a lot of these people—are the worrying kind. And they have more reason than most to be that way.

Cristina LaRue’s top-of-the-Business Section story Friday was dead-on. Dozens of farm families received the worst news last week.

“Thirty-nine producers here in northwest Arkansas woke up to a phone call Monday morning that changed their world,” said Chris Meador, a poultry farmer and also the chair of the Arkansas Farm Bureau’s poultry division. “Did some of them rebound and find other sources of revenue or another integrator? Perhaps, and we hope so. But they weren’t expecting this and I guarantee it wasn’t in their plan to have to be searching for another way to make income.”

Tyson Foods Inc. announced the closing of plants in Arkansas, Missouri and Indiana. Those job losses hurt. But down the chain, many farmers contracting with Tyson will have to find another poultry company to contract with—or figure out what to do with four or five or six (or more) football-field length buildings on their land doing little more than adding to property taxes.

We trust that Americans will still eat chicken. So these houses will be filled, eventually, with chickens from another company. But what if those companies have different standards than Tyson? How much will farmers have to “invest” to make code?

Surely the state of Arkansas has the kind of people who are trained to help these farmers, like the National Guard going in after a tornado.

Speaking of which, some of these contract farmers are probably thinking that they would have rather have been hit by a tornado. At least then they could have relied on insurance … .