The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South

By Leon Fink

The arrival of several hundred Guatemalan-born workers in a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant sets the stage for this dramatic story of human struggle in an age of globalization. When laborers' concerns about safety and fairness spark a strike and, ultimately, a unionizing campaign at Case Farms, the resulting decade-long standoff pits a recalcitrant New South employer against an unlikely coalition of antagonists. Mayan refugees from war-torn Guatemala, Mexican workers, and a diverse group of local allies join forces with the Laborers union. The ensuing clash becomes a testing ground for "new labor" workplace and legal strategies. In the process, the nation's fastest-growing immigrant region encounters a new struggle for social justice.

Using scores of interviews, Leon Fink gives voice to a remarkably resilient people. He shows that, paradoxically, what sustains these global travelers are the ties of local community. Whether one is finding a job, going to church, joining a soccer team, or building a union, kin and linguistic connections to the place of one's birth prove crucial in negotiating today's global marketplace.

A story set at the intersection of globalization and community, two words not often linked, The Maya of Morganton addresses fundamental questions about the changing face of labor in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2003
• ISBN: 9780807862414

Leon Fink

Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Book preview

Introduction

It was sometime in early spring 1997 when I first heard about a labor conflict in Morganton, North Carolina, a usually quiet industrial center of sixteen thousand people perched at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. I would soon learn that this was no isolated incident or temporary labor relations breakdown that I had stumbled upon but a decade-long war of position between determined and well-organized workers on the one hand and a classically recalcitrant employer on the other. It began with an overnight walkout in 1991, erupting into a mass work stoppage and multiple arrests in May 1993 and climaxing in a four-day strike and successful union election campaign in 1995. Confronting the company with a weeklong walkout and hunger strike in 1996 and subsequently standing firm for six years in the face of the company’s absolute refusal to sign a collective bargaining contract, the workers at Case Farms poultry plant etched a profile of uncommon (if still frustrated) courage in demanding a voice and degree of respect at the workplace.

From the start of my inquiries, news from the Case Farms battle posed a threefold fascination for a North American labor historian living (until the fall of 2000) three hours from Morganton by car in the university town of Chapel Hill. First, the events in Morganton were remarkable enough in themselves. For over twenty years I had watched organized labor virtually disappear off the map in North Carolina, losing battle after battle in campaigns among textile, furniture, and meat-processing workers. Indeed, when I had arrived in Chapel Hill in 1977 as the university’s first designated labor historian, one joke went that only a Fink could get such a job at a southern school. I laughed but did think twice when I discovered that my closest labor history colleague was Gary Fink at Georgia State University! Throughout my tenure at UNC, the state was locked in a seesaw battle with its South Carolina neighbor for the dubious honor of being the least unionized state in the country, a country that as a whole was experiencing a severe slippage of union representation in the private-sector workforce. What is more, the food-processing industry—especially meat products, of which poultry was a part—had earned a reputation as the most determined of union foes. In meatpacking, for example, where a set of new-breed packers based on corporate mergers and buyouts set the pace, both unionization and wages had fallen by half in the 1980s alone.¹

But there were two additional reasons to be intrigued by the Morganton story. The five-hundred-person Case Farms plant, estimated in 1995 as 80 percent Spanish-speaking—of whom 80 to 90 percent were Guatemalan and the rest Mexican—highlighted a demographic transformation of the U.S. labor force, nowhere more startling than in what one commentator has called the nuevo New South and, within the region, nowhere more so than in North Carolina, where the growth of the Hispanic population reached a whopping 394 percent in the decade 1990-2000.² Even more remarkably, the fact that the Guatemalans were nearly all Highland Maya—people who trace their bloodline and their languages back to the ancient corn people—suggested a most dramatic confrontation between what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of market capitalism and the social organization of one of the hemisphere’s oldest cultures. How was it, then, that in a state with not a single organized chicken-processing factory, a group of Central American refugees bucked the tide of history? Who were these people, where did they come from, and why did they act the way they did? Were they crazy and disoriented or did they know something about social struggles of which others were ignorant? In thinking about the uphill task that the immigrant poultry workers had assumed, I could not help but remember the comment reportedly uttered by slave rebel Nat Turner before his execution: Was not Christ crucified?

These are the issues I have sought to address in the following pages. In doing so, I have inevitably encountered other questions that have drawn my attention. Apart from the labor struggle itself, the perception and reception of the modern-day Maya in North Carolina became a crucial part of my story. How did an established community of whites and blacks react to the new émigrés? Who were the workers’ local allies? And how did the union that came to represent them—the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA)—fit the Morganton revolt into its own organizational strategies? A final arena of concern focuses on the nature of cultural adjustment among the new migrant workers. With what capacity and vision but also at what cost did the Guatemalan Maya transplant themselves to a new North American setting? How did the act of migration and, for some, permanent immigration affect their community’s welfare, both in the United States and back home in Guatemala?

Guatemalan migration to Morganton, North Carolina

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The story of the Maya in Morganton effectively joins one of the newest buzzwords of social science, globalization, with one of the oldest, community. Juxtaposing the two concepts, in fact, permits us to cover a great deal of interpretive ground. The entry of Guatemalan war refugees and later those we might well consider economic refugees into the poultry plants of North Carolina reflects the increasing fluidity of both world investments and labor markets. In ways that recall the experience of their nineteenth-century immigrant predecessors, the émigré Mayan workers use community at once to defend themselves against employer exploitation and to advance the interests of family and friends across international borders. These new immigrant carriers of a rural, communal culture may indeed offer instructive lessons to a more metropolitan labor movement in the United States. Even as contemporary sociologists inveigh against the decline of a broad-based civic culture in today’s consumer society, more and more of the hard work of the country is actually in the hands of people with a quite sturdy family and community structure—if little else. The combination of group ties and the necessity of relying on those ties in an alien environment creates an opening for worker mobilization. This is not to deny the obstacles that confront today’s bottom-rung labor force. Both modern-day power and money are stacked against them as never before. Nor is it to suggest that members of the Mayan diaspora are not themselves undergoing profound cultural displacement and acting in ways different from their revered ancestors. All of the above are true. The very richness of the mix, however, creates one of the more dramatic trials of the human spirit provoked by the faceless forces of globalization. This book is one testimony to those trials.

Mixing narrative with commentary, each chapter of the book is organized around a specific theme of its own. Chapter 1 (The Way It Is in Morganton) prepares us for the arrival of the Maya by concentrating on the previously settled population—whites, blacks, and Hmong refugees—of the town. In the midst of fears and some resentment of the newcomers’ demands on local services, a progressive, church-based group of professionals offered a crucial welcome. Chapter 2 (Flight of the Happy Farmers) focuses on the initial Guatemalan migrants—Q’anjob’al-speaking Maya from the mountain villages of the northwestern province of Huehuetenango—framing the first worker protest at the poultry plant against a longer background of Guatemalan civil war, terror, and escape. Even as a climate of coercion in Guatemala and the bias of U.S. immigration policy shrouded effective identification of the immigrants’ past political experience, a hint of transnational peasant wisdom in dealing with authority emerged among the raw factory recruits. Chapter 3 (How the Dead Helped to Organize the Living) looks behind the pivotal strike of 1995 to the wellsprings of solidarity among the single largest group of Case Farms workers—Awakatekos and Chalchitekos from the commercial agricultural valley of Aguacatán. An exploration of selective, family-level migration strategies reveals both the source of communal solidarity across borders and new grounds for divisions among a conflict-ridden people. Chapter 4 (No One Leader) examines the process of local union building with emphasis on the fragility of leadership. The alliance between a Salvadoran woman union organizer with young male workers from both Guatemala and Mexico survived continuous challenges from without and within. Chapter 5 (The Workers Are Ready) sets the Morganton union struggle within a context of national labor and political forces attempting to jump-start a larger workers’ movement for social justice. In particular, the Laborers union, fresh from federal indictment for corruption, tried to save its soul as well as its economic welfare by backing an exotic underdog.

By way of conclusion, the book takes two different analytic approaches. Chapter 6 (Changing Places) steps back from the workplace to inquire into the individual struggles of adaptation and identity among the global laborers and their families. Three different patterns of migration—birds of passage, assimilation, and transnational citizenship—it is argued, mix uneasily within the contemporary global marketplace. Chapter 7 (Sticking Together) connects the Morganton union story at once to prior immigrant history and to contemporary struggles for solidarity at both ends of the global migrant stream. Remarkably, and perhaps counterintuitively, we watch as migrant Mayan workers in the United States grope for a broader solidarity, while potentially fratricidal conflicts over identity politics and interethnic rivalries threaten their home communities.

Here, then, is the common thread of The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. To understand the motives and behavior of Third World workers—either on their home turf or as immigrant recruits to more developed metropoles—we need to fit them into a global political economy of competitive markets, changing technology, and a managerial logic of labor control. Yet, we must also recognize them as agents who continue to draw on local wisdom in advancing the interests of family, friendships, and community even in a faraway land.

Finally, I would like to add a brief word on the oral history sources for this work. Unlike studies in sociology, anthropology, or other social sciences, this book, as the reader will immediately notice, identifies its subjects by their real names. This is, in part, a disciplinary distinction. History generally takes the individual as its primary unit of analysis and insists that individuals, in their very peculiarity, count. It is all the more important, then, that those who—like immigrant poultry workers—have heretofore been left out of public awareness as well as the scholarly record should make their properly identified mark.

Yet, I am not ignorant of the special risks involved in writing about today’s new immigrant workforce. No doubt, Case Farms—like virtually every other low-wage manufacturing firm across the country—employs a significant number of illegal (i.e., undocumented or improperly documented) workers. But when I raised the issue of confidentiality with workers themselves, they regularly waved it off. Many with whom I talked arrived in the United States early enough to apply for naturalization. In a few instances, they told me that they had given me their Case Farms name, not their given name, and I investigated no further.³ Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those consulted for the book no longer work at Case Farms and in some cases are no longer in the country. I received explicit permission to quote all those cited in the text. For anyone who hesitated, I offered the option of anonymity or off-the-record comments. As it happened, the only respondents who took up either of these options were former company executives or their legal counsel.

1

The Way It Is in Morganton

Like many aspiring southern towns, Morganton, North Carolina, offers a contradictory impression to the inquiring outsider. In one reflection, it turns the face of tradition and familiarity toward an otherwise anomic and ever-changing world. In the early 1970s, for example, a refugee from New England arrived in North Carolina with her law school-teaching husband and soon set to writing about a town with a heart, a people who reflect an inner happiness. An unparalleled shift in population is under way in America, declared Marion Lieberman in a regular column, Morganton on My Mind, published in the local weekly News-Herald. Like herself, she believed, many are coming back to—or discovering for the first time—the serenity and comfort of a small town. ¹ And, no doubt, to an erstwhile city dweller, there is a distinct folksiness to social relations in Morganton. It is still a place where, during the summer’s heat, one can find a few older white folk gathered under a shade tree with fans, happy to treat a visitor to a lemonade and an unhurried discussion of events hither and yon. There is talk of a friend working in the nearby village, Glen Alpine, they call Glenpin; of the dangers of air-conditioning as a cause of pneumonia and an irritant to arthuritis; of the recent Fourth of July celebrated with a big kadoo uptown; and of a new local professional rasslin’ hall featuring a bunch of boys from Burke County. The down-home hospitality of the community extends to its religious institutions: on the outskirts of town, for instance, local Methodists invite passersby to join the perfect church for those who aren’t.

Yet, it is not so much old country charm but modern, urban innovation that one senses in the gleaming steeples and glistening mansions of Union Street, which initially bisects the town east and west and ultimately leads past shopping malls and a municipal greenway. With good reason, Morganton prefers to see itself as a dynamic, progressive community that has repeatedly embraced economic and social changes invading what was once an agricultural village nestled in the Catawba River Valley at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Named after Revolutionary War hero Daniel Morgan, who led a combination of regular troops and local militia to a stunning victory at the Battle of Cowpens, the town, the oldest settlement in the western part of the state, was commissioned in 1784 as the seat of Burke County. In the course of its history, Morganton was a stopping-off point for legendary frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as well as the birthplace of its most famous latter-day representative, Watergate inquisitor Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Economically, the area initially served as both a transportation and a commercial gateway connecting the plantation South to new western markets. That slaves should compose more than a quarter of the Burke County population in 1860 testified to the wealth and influence of a coterie of leading local families.² By the late nineteenth century, agriculture was joined by industry, as the lumbering trade, furniture factories, and to a lesser extent textile mills increasingly absorbed the local labor force. Drexel Furniture, for example, destined to become a state and national industry leader, got its start in Morganton in 1903.

The biggest spur to economic development, however, did not arrive until after World War II with the construction in 1960-61 of an Interstate 40 link across Burke County. A local Chamber of Commerce report boasted in 1964 that since 1960, twelve new industries located in Morganton or within its environs. Included among the new, humming enterprises of that decade were several furniture firms, a shoe company, a fish hatchery, a knitting mill, a machine tool operation, and Breeden’s Poultry and Egg, Inc., which later became Case Farms. Altogether, local industry boomed in the postwar period; as late as 1995 about 47 percent of the Burke County labor force was engaged in manufacturing. Aside from industry, the local economy depended on government workers (more than in any other city outside the state capital in Raleigh) centered in the psychiatric Broughton Hospital, established in 1882 as the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum; the Western Carolina Center, which has served since 1963 as a research and diagnostic center for the severely mentally disabled; the state school for the deaf, established in 1894; Western Piedmont Community College, established in 1968; and the Western Correctional Center, a model state prison that promised private rooms for each inmate (or resident) when it opened in 1972.³

Although in the Civil War Morganton had paid dearly for its adherence to the Lost Cause—the town was ransacked by Union general George Stoneman’s raiders in 1865—local leaders (including several descendants of the older slaveholding elite) proved more nimble in dealing with latter-day race relations. Thanks to the uncommonly large local public sector, African Americans in Morganton gained access to steadier and higher-paying jobs than were commonly available elsewhere. Prior planning by local church and political leaders—including Senator Ervin’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Ervin, who served on the school board—ensured that integration of the local high school proceeded without incident in the mid-1960s, years ahead of most of its North Carolina neighbors.⁴ Rev. W. Flemon McIntosh Jr., a popular black schoolteacher and football coach who helped smooth the town’s desegregation effort, proudly called Morganton a conservative-progressive community . . . we make each step safe and sound, in the best interest of everybody. ⁵ Yet, the very economic and educational opportunities that opened to local African Americans in the 1960s also led many of them to go elsewhere: by 1990 blacks represented less than 7 percent of the local population.⁶ I lost two of my own children to that, sighed McIntosh with a smile.⁷

Downtown Morganton, looking down Union Street.

Photo courtesy of Pam Walker.

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Socially, the town and its environs have played host to a variety of newcomers over the years. While remaining, like its western North Carolina neighbors, largely a demographic offspring of early British Protestants and Scotch-Irish pioneers, the area has, in fact, absorbed three rather uncommon immigrant colonies in the past century. At the turn of the twentieth century several hundred French-speaking Waldensians—a Calvinist sect that had undergone numerous repressions and dislocations—made their way to Burke County, thickly settling in a community they named Valdese (famous for furniture, hosiery, textiles, and bakery products). Then, beginning in the late 1970s, some five hundred Laotian Hmong families—refugees from the Vietnam War who had originally been airlifted to Minneapolis, Minnesota—also resettled in Morganton, with help from area churches and federal monies.⁸ The latest immigrant wave, which started almost unnoticed in the late 1980s but has grown irrepressibly since, speaks with a Spanish accent. At once a reflection of a larger Latino, especially Mexican, migration affecting the entire United States (and nowhere more dramatically than among the formerly ethnically insular southeastern states), Morganton’s newest immigrants present the distinctive profile of being majority indigenous Maya from Guatemala. Though spanning the globe in their diversity, the area’s three twentieth-century immigrant groups—counting the Waldensians, the Hmong/Laotians, and, most recently, the Guatemalans—share at least two qualities in common. They are all people of the mountains, and they each have experienced a past of group persecution.

In short, Morganton has just cause to think of itself as a southern town, but with a difference. John Vail, who ran the area legal services office (1988- 97), provided one useful snapshot of the town in the years immediately prior to the Guatemalan arrival. A New Jersey native, Vail selected Morganton as a desirable family location for its higher demographics—there was more money and education in Morganton, and the politics there struck him as more enlightened than in most places in the region, a claim symbolized by unwavering local support for a democratic city council and regular reelection since 1985 of a Jewish mayor, Mel Cohen.

To be sure, Morganton also fit expected southern political-economic proprieties: old wealth centered in real estate interests and powerful law firms exercised disproportionate weight in public affairs. Labor unions, a political anathema across North Carolina and long beaten down in the town’s furniture-making sector, survived in only one workplace, a small firm making carbon fiber products.⁹ Indeed, as one local schoolteacher, who would himself soon try to help organize the new immigrant workers, put it, general reaction to the word union in North Carolina was worse than ‘AIDS,’ worse than ‘cancer.’ ¹⁰ Given the state’s dominant political culture, it is perhaps not surprising that a young Sam Ervin served as commander of a National Guard unit called in to quell the Gastonia textile workers’ strike of 1929. As Jean C. Ervin, the ninety-two-year-old sister of the town’s most distinguished native son, recalled, [Sam] was hit by a rock [thrown] by one of the strikers, good thing he was wearing a helmet! ¹¹

In such a modestly sized but upwardly aspiring community, the local poultry plant was, as John Vail remembered it, the town’s dirty little secret. To be sure, Breeden’s Poultry company had begun innocuously enough. Tom Breeden, a local barber, had, with the help of his wife, started up a little weekend poultry business in the mid-1950s. As one recent study of the poultry labor force indicates, Raising chickens for eggs and meat had been, for decades, a supplementary household or domestic producer operation, fueled mainly by women and child family labor, whose symbols had been Mother Hen and the farm wife’s ‘egg money.’¹² Before long, Breeden had extended his local poultry and egg hobby into a thriving, full-time New York dress business—they’d dress the birds—leave the feet and everything but take the feathers off, ice them down and put them into barrels, then haul them to New York and sell them. In these early years of the industry, according to Charles Ramsey, who had learned the poultry dressing business while a student at Berea College and went to work for Breeden in 1962, the work was hand done—[we] killed by hand, picked them on old drumpickers where you’d hold them by the feet. Over the years we made equipment in our own shop, [including one machine] where you use your foot with a spring to cut their feet off. We managed to make stuff to peel the gizzards, things to harvest the oil glands. . . . I can remember when you could run eighty birds a minute, it would take about eighty people to run those eighty birds. The 1960s and 1970s, said Ramsey, who was Breeden’s plant manager from 1975 on, saw a tide of inventions applied to the production process. When I left [in 1995] they were running 120 birds with about forty people, so you can see how far the plant has come in forty years, there’s equipment to do every job now. In short, what began as a marginal operation had grown over a few decades into a substantial business enterprise. As if to complete its arrival on the area’s stage, a Breeden daughter married an Erwin, one of the oldest and most successful families in the Catawba Valley. Yet, the material success of the poultry plant could not efface its unfavorable local reputation. Not only did the plant emit a noxious stench, but also the labor force regularly absorbed and regurgitated local employees of last resort, allegedly including Broughton Hospital patients and alcoholics.

Breeden’s problems with labor recruitment were part and parcel of the peculiar dynamism of this post-World War II industry. Prior to that time, as Herbert Hoover’s a chicken in every pot campaign promise suggested, chickens generally needed extended stewing. But postwar entrepreneurs like Arthur W. Perdue combined new processing techniques, name-brand recognition, and integrated control of egg growers, farmers, feed producers, and processors under one corporate roof to virtually revolutionize what became known, by the early 1960s, as the broiler industry. In subsequent years, the marketing of fast-food chicken—spearheaded by the preeminence of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in the 1960s and accelerated by McDonald’s introduction of Chicken McNuggets in the 1980s—and rising health concerns about red meat created an explosive demand for chicken products that continues to the present day. Two facts summarize the recent trends: in 1992 U.S. consumption of chicken surpassed the consumption of beef, and whereas as late as 1980 most chicken was sold whole, by 2000 nearly 90 percent of the chicken sold in the United States had been cut into pieces.¹³

Market success, however, has bred a demand for labor not easily satisfied through conventional sources. For one, a search for a uniform-sized chicken—required for both assembly-line (or, rather, disassembly-line) production processes and fast-food automatic frying vats—has placed a continuing premium on locating processing plants near rural growing areas. Second, since a consolidation move in the 1980s (eight large processors now control two-thirds of the U.S. market), production has concentrated in the South, where mild weather and low land and labor costs maximize managerial initiative. Moreover, as big and small producers alike fight it out for market control, a still-competitive industry has succeeded in keeping a tight lid on wage costs. Since the early 1970s the poultry wage, the lowest in the entire food industry, has languished at roughly 60 percent that of the U.S. manufacturing average. Through a combination of regional incentives, by the end of the 1990s approximately half of all poultry processing had concentrated in four low-wage, anti-union states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina.¹⁴

From the beginning of the industry’s development in the 1950s and 1960s, low land and labor costs favored location in southern states, and that trend continues. Once the surplus labor of depressed, southern farming areas was tapped out in the 1980s, however—against the backdrop of a generally booming Sunbelt economy (offering other, usually more pleasant as well as more remunerative options to the traditional factory labor force)—poultry employers proved both desperate (and adventuresome) in seeking a new low-wage recruitment base. The answer came swiftly. Latino workers represented less than 10 percent of the overall poultry labor force in 1988, but by 1993 this aggregate figure had jumped to 25 percent. In Morganton, and in other poultry centers like the tristate Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula (home to Perdue Farms), the demographic change would be even more dramatic.¹⁵

Almost from the beginning of the Breeden plant’s expansion came a search for new labor. The late sixties witnessed the entry of African American workers into a formerly all-white labor force; by the mid-1980s nearly a quarter of the workforce was black. There was feelings there, remembered Ramsey, but we didn’t have a lot of troubles. The trouble was more in keeping the plant running. Burke County has all kinds of furniture industry, explained Ramsey,

they’ve got all kinds of [textile] mills. So they got very competitive for the help, and locally you wouldn’t have enough people in Burke County to fill the jobs. I’ve gone in on days where you needed to be running two quad lines of birds, and you wouldn’t have enough to run but maybe a line and a half because you couldn’t get the people to handle it. So then we started running buses; we used to bus people from down in Lincolnton [fifty miles away] and different places like that. As a matter of fact, we had people living as far away as Cleveland County, and they’d take the bus home in the afternoon.

Too many were also taking the bus elsewhere. For many workers, Ramsey said, poultry work proved to be an entry-level job, equipping new recruits with an industrial work ethic that they could use to their own advantage. Poultry workers could bring their lunch in the morning, and if they wanted to go somewhere else they could find a job, take their lunch with them and be at work somewhere else the next day.

Katherine Harbison, just seventeen years old when she first took a job pulling craws (extracting the windpipe from the chicken neck) at Breeden’s after she and a few other African American friends dropped out of high school in the late 1970s, indirectly confirmed Ramsey’s complaint that local workers did possess some minimal choice over their work assignments. Resenting the extended workdays that the company had adopted in the face of a shrinking labor pool, Harbison recalled, me and these other couple of girls got together at lunchtime and we decided we was going to punch out at 4 [P.M.] because we know they couldn’t fire us, we [had] made our eight hours. ¹⁶ Despite threats of dismissal, Harbison continued at Breeden’s for several years, regularly refusing overtime assignments, as part of an unskilled, low-wage workforce that was not easily replaceable.

Tom Breeden, in Ramsey’s charitable terms, was a people person. Tightfisted when it came to wages and benefits, he nevertheless, according to Ramsey, personally cared about his employees and even set up a modest profit-sharing plan. Whatever Breeden’s employment strategy, however, he could not stem the tide leaving his factory. As Ramsey observed, he saw the crunch coming. That’s probably why he sold the place. ¹⁷

In 1988 Tom Shelton, fired from the presidency of Perdue Farms after a falling-out with owner Frank Perdue, added Breeden’s Poultry to an earlier acquisition of the independent Case Farms company in the Amish district of Winesburg, Ohio (where it produced its Amish Country Pride brand label). Shelton’s own background was in the agricultural side of the business (i.e., raising the birds), and from the beginning he approached the challenge of an efficient processing factory strictly as a technical issue. Shelton, remembered