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November 1939. "Selected turkeys on the racks awaiting shipment. Cooperative poultry house in Brownwood, Texas." Medium format negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
In the 1930s my grandfather was a county agent and professor of agriculture at Mississippi State. A lot of his job involved keeping the hard-pressed local farms solvent through very bad times.
His research efforts convinced him that local farmers could make a bit of cash on the side by raising a few turkeys and shipping them north for the holidays (holidays for the Yankees, not the turkeys).
A bunch of farmers quickly formed a sort of cooperative and started raising the birds, and toward the end of the year they hired a whole boxcar and sent them off to Chicago. The boxcar was shunted off to a siding somewhere along the way, the turkeys all froze to death, and they were then discarded. Utter disaster.
The next year a new platoon of turkeys was ready and the co-op placed a potbellied stove and a determined farmer in the boxcar to supervise things. At last, the scheme was successful.
Did they cover their heads before killing 'em or after?
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