In the twentieth century a number of factors came together to make poultry one of Arkansas’s leading agricultural industries and a foremost producer in the United States of broilers, turkeys, and chicken eggs. While broilers are raised in two-thirds of the state’s counties, the Ozarks region leads in output. Architecturally, the industry today is most visible in the clusters of parallel rows of long narrow chicken houses.
Commercial production of broiler chickens began in Arkansas as early as the 1890s, and the Arkansas Poultry Breeders Association was formed in 1897. From the beginning the Ozarks’ gentle hills were well suited to poultry farming, but the industry remained small scale until the 1920s. Following a drought in 1927 that severely damaged the region’s fruit trees, many farmers turned to raising chickens, and improved and new roads and bridges allowed the birds and eggs to be transported long distances, especially north to Missouri and Chicago. Later, in the 1960s when Arkansas developed as a major commercial trucking center, it was due in large part to the growth of the poultry industry and the goal of shipping its products nationwide.
The earliest chicken houses were small wooden structures with a window for ventilation and a door-like opening for the birds to exit and enter. These constructions were suitable for the limited output of small farms, but by the late 1930s when John W. Tyson began to dominate the industry, much larger structures were built. Today, chicken houses or sheds are up to 600 feet in length and 50 feet wide and can hold around 40,000 fowl. The structures are put together from prefabricated building kits, steel framed, with metal siding and gable roofs, and more or less identical to each other. Tyson also expanded and consolidated the poultry industry, controlling all aspects of production, from hatcheries to processing plants and to supplying chain supermarkets and fast-food outlets. Inevitably, small independent farms could not compete.
By the late twentieth century, the poultry business began to confront and find solutions to the environmental problems it had created, such as soil and water pollution and contamination from chicken waste and runoff, and began to pay attention to the health of the industry’s workers in the farms and processing plants.
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