Tyson Foods

Tyson Foods, Inc. is one of the largest meat companies in the United States. It buys chickens from contract growers, slaughters cattle and hogs, and sells boxed meat and brands such as Jimmy Dean.

Poultry contracting is a tournament: growers own the barns and the debt, Tyson owns the birds, the feed, and the processing slot. That structure is a vertical restraint. Growers have argued it is also a trap, because a single plant is the only buyer for a specialized barn.

The Justice Department and private plaintiffs have pursued wage and price cases involving poultry processors, including allegations that processors exchanged compensation data or coordinated chicken prices. Several firms have settled pieces of that litigation. Those settlements are not a finding that every claim against Tyson was proved at trial.

Further processing mergers run into a market that is already concentrated at the plant level. A plant closure changes the only buyer a county's growers have.

Contract grower systems leave farmers with sunk barns and one processor.

Wage and data-exchange cases among processors are horizontal theories, separate from the grower contract.

Private broiler price-fixing litigation has produced settlements across the industry. Settlement is not the same as a verdict.

Plant-level concentration means a merger or a closure is a local monopsony event.

Grocery chicken prices are the downstream symptom. The people with the fewest options are growers with a mortgage on a house that only fits one processor's birds.

A plant town loses its buyer if Tyson idles a facility. There is often no second shift to join.