There is a good chance that one of four major companies supplied the turkey on your Thanksgiving table this week.
There are just over 40 large-scale turkey processing plants in the country, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Four companies account for the majority of these plants.
Butterball
Headquartered in Garner, North Carolina, Butterball is a major turkey company that the multinational agribusiness -Seaboard Corporation owns a majority stake in. Butterball had a net income of $43 million at of the end of September, according to a recent Securities Exchange Commission filing. Butterball has processing plants in Arkansas, Missouri and North Carolina.
Jennie-O Turkey Store
The Jennie-O Turkey brand is owned by Hormel Foods, a public company headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, that also owns familiar food products SPAM and Planters Peanuts. Hormel had over $3 billion in sales as of July, according to SEC filings. Jennie-O Turkey plants operate in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Cargill Meat
Cargill is the nation’s largest private company and is headquartered in Wayzata, Minnesota. The company operates innumerous sectors, including animal feed, pesticides and beef. Cargill, which reported $154 billion in revenue earlier this year, according to company filings, operates turkey plants in Virginia, Texas, Arkansas and Nebraska.
Tyson Foods
Tyson Foods is the nation’s largest chicken company and one of the nation’s largest beef processors. The public company is headquartered in Springdale, Arkansas, and reported $54 billion in annual sales, according to a recent SEC filing. The company operates turkey processing and prepared food plants under the Hillshire Farms brand in Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee.
That same Thanksgiving turkey was also likely raised under a model of production some experts and farmers call exploitative.
Just like chickens, the majority of turkeys raised in the U.S. are raised under a production contract where farmers own the land, barns and machinery to raise birds but do not own the livestock they raise.
These systems have a history of pitting neighboring farms against each other, and growers have little information about how their payments are calculated.
Contract farming in the turkey industry has only grown in recent decades.
In 2002, 64% of all turkeys raised in the U.S. were done so under a production contract, per USDA Census data. This percentage grew to 72% in 2022.
The federal government sought to change the way these systems operate for poultry farmers, but in 2024, turkey growers were excluded from final federal rulemaking.
