Chicken Processing in Alabama

All I Ever Wanted to do Was Farm

by Morris Dees of Alabama

It was a hot Thursday afternoon in 1954. The water was 180 degrees. I killed the fryer-size chicken and dipped it into the scalding water tank. Then I held it up to the spinning wheel of my home-made picker. I watched as my invention stripped the feathers downward until the chicken was bald. Success. One down and 249 to go. A new project on our cotton farm. One that would bring money all year.

My momma and daddy had been raising cotton as tenant farmers since I was born in 1936. We later owned a small farm alongside U.S. 80 twelve miles east of Montgomery, with forty acres of level loam soil. We rented another two hundred from nearby estates. In 1947, when I was 10, we had ten mules to break and plow the rows.

We raised corn to feed mules and cotton to sell. We had little capital and, most often, major farm losses. A good crop depended on adequate rain, fair prices and few boll weevils. Unfortunately, one of these three contingencies usually failed each year, reducing and sometimes totally ruining our yield after months of hard work. So we planted a garden full of vegetables and pinched pennies for groceries. Daddy bought a cotton gin on credit to help make ends meet. Farm families came from all over because he offered a fair and honest price to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds.

I often read Progressive Farmer magazine for new ideas on modern and diversified practices. My daddy thought these ideas were a waste of time. We did purchase a Farmall M tractor in 1948, joining the mass movement of tractors replacing mules on thousands of cotton acres from Alabama to Mississippi and across the delta. That was about all the progress my daddy could stand.

I bought my first small feeder pig when I was eight. By high school, I had learned how to feed my 150 pigs at no cost, on school lunchroom scraps that the lunch ladies let me tote off every day. When my Dodge van wasn’t filled with student leftovers for my pigs, it was filled with my acre of watermelons. I blew the horn, bringing customers from homes adjoining miles of cotton fields and making a nice small profit.

At twelve, a country store owner in Mt. Meigs let me build a rack at the front of the store and stock it with used tires I found all over the countryside. I priced them right. Folks would pull off the busy road for a Coke and bologna sandwich and end up purchasing tires, earning me hundreds of dollars each year.

As a teenager, I fenced seventy-five of my parents’ acres to raise cattle. By the time I left for college my herd had grown from one to thirty-five. Daddy took care of them after I left.

North of Alabama’s cotton growing area, a major processing plant processed thousands of chickens a day. Progressive Farmer had an article on this relatively new farming practice. I visited the plant and watched with fascination as live chickens were quickly moved from trucks and transformed into ready-to-eat fryers. I studied the process closely. I wanted to do this on our farm.

I found a round cylinder and attached a pulley wheel on the side. A two by four wood frame held the cylinder. I added six-inch rubber hoses in lines around its circumference. A small electric motor turned the cylinder at the correct speed. Hot water loosened the feathers as I turned the birds over and over. I iced the finished birds and stuffed each with the liver, gizzard, feet and other parts. Four country stores agreed to take my newly dressed chickens.

One store owner called about a month after he started selling my chickens, along with those mass-produced at the plant I had visited. He told me my chickens were causing him a problem. I thought this would end my new venture. When I visited his store to get the bad news, he said the factory-processed chickens did not include the feet like my chickens did. His customers liked the feet and complained that the factory chickens were not a good deal. I ended up feeding chicken feet to my pigs each week.

My Future Farmers of America teacher thought my diversified practices were very good. He entered me in the annual statewide FFA student of the year contest. To brag a bit, I won this award and was proud that my parents came to see me accept it at the Auburn University presentation.

All I wanted to do after high school was farm, but there was no land I could buy or rent for a serious farm operation. Daddy discouraged me from pursuing farming. He said farming was on its way out and encouraged me to go to law school. I went to the University of Alabama for college, followed by law school. I founded the Southern Poverty Law Center and was its chief trial counsel for 50 years. Our work on behalf of poor and disadvantaged folks spread across the nation. A highlight of my career was being awarded the American Bar Association’s Medal, its highest honor. I’ve given hundreds of talks and commencement speeches at colleges, offering creative ideas for progress and always relying on lessons I learned from the farming way of life. I think my daddy would have been proud. He died in a car wreck shortly after I got out of law school.

I’m 87 today. Last year, my wife, Katie, also a lawyer, and I built a country home on a couple hundred acres in rural Alabama that once belonged to my great uncle. Our new farming operation is just getting started; soybeans, oats, and hay are on the list. We have a large vegetable garden just like the one I tended to as a boy, and our fruit trees are coming along nicely. I’m partial to the pears, and Katie loves our persimmons. I still love snapping a juicy, red tomato off the vine and biting right into it under the hot afternoon sun. My grandson, Daniel, and his wife, Amber, live next door. He and I are finishing up a greenhouse for our ferns and outdoor plants. Katie and Amber spend lots of time with our family dogs and best friends, Paco and Josie.

Most evenings, we sit on our back porch with a glass of wine and sometimes Katie’s guitar, taking in the view of the lake that sits on the spot where Uncle Johnny once raised his cotton. We watch the egrets gather by the hundreds in the cypress trees for their evening gossip sessions and the occasional hawk swoop down to steal an unsuspecting small bass. Long walks in the pasture among the grazing cattle are my daily exercise. It’s still true – all I ever wanted to do was farm.