The Cackle King

Poultry men, who count their chickens after they are hatched, last week got a big surprise. Totting up preliminary results of chicken raising for 1951, they figured that Georgia had become the No. 1 chicken-producing state in the nation, passing Delaware, which has been the biggest producer for six years. Georgia, which has boosted chicken output some 5,000% in the last ten years, gained nearly 50% last year alone, to a record production of 92 million birds. It was the latest example of the South's burgeoning business enterprise.

The man responsible for Georgia's clucking, cackling boom is Jesse D. Jewell, 49, who started raising chickens in a rickety wooden shed, 16 years ago. Today, with 2,000,000 chickens under his wing, Jesse Jewell, according to trade-association estimates, is the biggest U.S. chicken raiser. Every week, 30 carloads of chicken feed, worth $90,000, roll into Jewell's Gainesville headquarters; every week 150,000 chickens, killed and dressed, roll out to U.S. and foreign outlets. Last year Jewell grossed $12 million.

Feeding & Breeding. Jewell was practically forced into the chicken business after he went to work selling feed in his mother's feed, seed and fertilizer business. When he couldn't sell the feed to the poor farmers of the area, he borrowed $6,000 from a local bank, raised a flock of chickens on the unsold feed, and sold them at a profit.

Jewell expanded, broadening his markets by eviscerating his birds and shipping them fully dressed, packed in ice. As volume grew, Jewell enlisted the aid of banks and feed companies to set up a system which enabled North Georgia's farmers, who were too poor to finance a business of their own, to go into business with him. Other big processors, such as Swift and Wilson, moved into the area and copied Jewell's method.

Jewell ships out chicks to nearly 1,000 farmers in eleven counties, provides them with feed, on credit. After the birds are fattened, Jewell takes them back, paying the farmers on the basis of weight gained. His rule of thumb: an average flock of 1,000 chicks should attain a live weight of 2 3/4 Ibs. apiece in eleven weeks, on 9,000 Ibs. of feed. For this standard performance, the farmer nets $125. If more feed is used, the farmer is docked; if less, he gets a premium.

Jewell extended this lend-lease system to breeder-flocks, now has 54 farm families tending chickens that lay 165,000 New Hampshire Red eggs a week for Jewell's Gainesville hatchery. By carefully controlled feeding and breeding, he has eliminated the seasonal swings in laying, keeps his processing plant humming at capacity the year round.

30 Below Zero. Jewell's trucks keep up a constant exchange of baby chicks for fattened broilers. After a final 36 hours of heavy feeding, the broilers are hung on a moving belt in Jewell's processing plant and killed, plucked, cleaned and rolled into a tunnel, where they are frozen stiff for shipping by a blast of 30-below-zero wind at 40 m.p.h. Jewell wastes little of the chicken. From the insides he makes soap oils and "tankage," which goes back into feed. From feathers he makes fertilizer.

With meat prices sky-high and chicken down 23% in the past three years, Jesse Jewell and other big chicken raisers are sitting pretty. Since the nation has increased its appetite for chicken from 100 million to 750 million birds a year, chicken men see no reason why the cackle boom should not be permanent.

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