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Tyson Foods is the nation's largest chicken producer, and it has been closing processing plants, sometimes putting chicken farmers out of business. As Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports, a group of Missouri farmers sued. They are alleging that Tyson sacrificed their farms to raise the price of chicken.

FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Imagine a picture of a farm on a tub of yogurt or a box of granola - big, red barn, down a windy road, green fields hemmed in by forested hills, glistening with fresh rain.

(SOUNDBITE OF THUNDER RUMBLING)

MORRIS: That's where Kiley and Shawn Hinkle actually live, for now.

SHAWN HINKLE: That's pretty much all ours, I guess. It is for the time being, anyway (laughter).

MORRIS: Hinkle has been raising cattle here deep in the southeastern Missouri Ozarks most of his life. He works alongside his father, 79-year-old Ken Hinkle, who built this farm with long hours tending livestock and a deputy sheriff's salary.

KEN HINKLE: My whole life is right here. It's not just, hey, this is life, you know? This is blood running through this vein.

MORRIS: But this farm's in trouble. A decade ago, Hinkle signed a contract with Tyson Foods to produce fertile eggs - not the kind you eat, but the kind hatched into new chickens to keep the industry going. That meant that Hinkle had to borrow more than $2.5 million to build four red chicken houses, each stretching 500 feet long, lined up precisely in an old cow pasture. For years, they hummed with tens of thousands of roosters and hens, producing millions of eggs for Tyson's hatchery in Dexter, Mo. But last year, Tyson abruptly closed its Dexter complex. Now, the chicken houses are empty, and Hinkle is buried in debt.

K HINKLE: The single worst decision that I ever made was building these chicken houses because it's put everything behind me and everything in front of me in jeopardy, and that's a weight that'll crush any man.

MORRIS: Like other chicken farmers, Hinkle was vulnerable because Tyson owned the chickens on his farm. It supplied the feed. Tyson even owned the eggs he produced. It just paid him to keep the operation running to its exacting specifications.

BRANDON BOULWARE: These farmers essentially become sharecroppers on their own land.

MORRIS: Brandon Boulware is Hinkle's lawyer.

BOULWARE: Tyson controls every aspect of the grow process. And there's only one company that's going to pay them for the chickens, and that's Tyson.

MORRIS: That was especially true in southeast Missouri, where Tyson was the only chicken company around.

BOULWARE: These farmers, at the time the plant closure was announced, they're in a desperate shape because they're sitting on millions of dollars of debt in these chicken houses, and the chicken houses are, overnight, worthless.

MORRIS: Boulware alleges that Tyson closed the plant to reduce chicken supply and boost prices. He says Tyson took pains to make sure that no chicken would be processed at the plant it sold in Dexter. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey are threatening antitrust action. Tyson didn't comment for this story, but where politicians and farm families see conspiracy, Jada Thompson sees capitalism.

JADA THOMPSON: This is a matter of competition in a marketplace.

MORRIS: Thompson, an agribusiness economist at the University of Arkansas, says the chicken industry is changing fast. And older plants, like the one Tyson was running in Dexter, haven't kept up.

THOMPSON: We have a pretty young industry. So you had processing plants that were opened, you know, you think in the '70s and '80s and '90s, and now we're kind of potentially getting to the useful life of those. And the idea is, do I keep this plant, and do I renovate it, or do I go build another one?

MORRIS: Go build another one can be a pretty attractive option. That's because it takes a lot fewer employees to run a new heavily automated processing plant, and building a new plant can generate hefty tax breaks. Thompson says the chicken industry's razor-thin margins slice away inefficiencies, and Tyson's Dexter complex was just one of them. Ken Hinkle is not having it.

K HINKLE: No. No. Hey; what's right's right, and what's wrong's wrong. My family, we have all always been fighters, I mean, like in this situation here. We may or may not win, but by the same token, we're going to fight.

MORRIS: Hinkle hopes that his high-stakes fight will restore the family's finances to a time before chicken farming. It may also change the industry that keeps America in chicken sandwiches. For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.

(SOUNDBITE OF JAKE BLOUNT'S "GOODBYE, HONEY, YOU CALL THAT GONE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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