Rural town braces for Tyson plant closure, as manufacturing booms elsewhere

Tyson had even provided an Enterprise rental car for Handy’s 40-minute commute, freeing up his own vehicle for his daughter to drive. Now, on top of the $800 rent he has been paying alone, he’ll be pinching pennies to purchase a second car, ideally by the time the Noel plant closes on Oct. 20.

“This is really financially crushing. Our sole income is from this company,” said Handy, who earns $18 an hour as a member of Local 2008, a chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. After past nonviolent brushes with law enforcement, working a steady job at Tyson has been transformative.

“My life has completely changed,” he said; colleagues at the plant “became my friends and family, and I relied on that.”

“Starting over is scary,” he added, “especially with a criminal background. It narrows it down pretty slim.”

A Tyson spokesperson said its “difficult decisions” to close the six poultry plants “are necessary to improve performance and demonstrate our commitment to taking bold actions to improve our business moving forward. At the same time, we continue to invest for the future across communities in the U.S.”

The poultry industry has been battered by a global avian flu outbreak and ballooning grain costs, but Tyson has also struggled with its own inefficiencies, said Kristoffer Inton, a Morningstar analyst who covers the company. Those include difficulties balancing how much meat it grows versus buys from other producers.

“The cost of feed went up, but that affected everybody,” said Inton. “You could probably chalk up some of it to stuff that affected the entire industry and some of it to [things] Tyson should have done better.”

As the company works to find its footing, laid-off plant workers’ fortunes might hinge on where they live. In North Little Rock, Arkansas — where Tyson employs 300 people in a community of 65,000 abutting the state capital’s metro area — other big companies such as Amazon and Costco have expanded, drawing young professionals and job opportunities.

Earlie Jones, a 52-year-old production lead at the North Little Rock plant that is set to close Oct. 7, said he has been applying to warehouse jobs in the area, including at the industrial supplier Global Manufacturing Inc.

“I’m just hoping and praying that this job will come through,” said Jones, who is currently his household’s only earner. His wife, Joya, has had several surgeries in recent years, and her disability insurance payments were revoked earlier this year.

Jones sounded confident he’ll have another job when his 13-year tenure at the meat company ends, but he vowed, “I will not work for Tyson again.”

The uptick in manufacturing investment hasn’t overlooked rural communities, and the South has particularly benefited from the influx of capital.

Southern states, which account for 34% of U.S. gross domestic product, garnered 42% of the industrial investments announced in recent years, according to the Brookings Institution. The Biden administration’s push to spur domestic production of semiconductors and clean energy technology has also contributed to a disproportionate flurry of development across the region.

Tyson itself is finishing construction of new plants in Danville, Virginia, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, that it expects will employ 400 and 450 people, respectively. The company also said it invested $425 million in Humboldt, Tennessee, to build one of its largest-ever poultry complexes, which opened in 2021.

In Noel, Tyson has been a magnet for a diverse immigrant community now facing greater uncertainty. For around 15 years, hundreds of workers from Somalia, Sudan and Micronesia — many of them refugees from armed conflict — have poured in to fill jobs at the plant, bringing their families to rural McDonald County, which encompasses Noel and forms Missouri’s southwest corner.