The Unending Quest to Build a Better Chicken
15th January 2025
The tale of Lloyd Peterson is almost too perfect an American parable. Born in rural Arkansas in 1912, Peterson was the grandson of pioneers who, as the tales have it, rolled into the Ozarks by wagon. He was too hardworking a fifth grader to take money from his parents, so he dug ditches, mowed lawns, milked cows, sold newspapers. He was too practical a 22-year-old to accept a professional baseball contract offered by the New York Giants, choosing instead to manage a farm store in Decatur. “Lloyd Peterson developed his business by being fair and honest,” one industry biography reports.
Soon he began to deal in chickens, which he sold to local farmers to be raised and shipped live to cities across the Midwest. By 1939, Peterson had decided to keep a flock to produce “broilers,” the term for chickens destined to become dinner.
It was the eve of a growth spurt for both the chicken industry and the chickens themselves. Technology was key. New indoor barns featured artificial light and heating, promoting faster growth. Nutritionists carefully formulated feeds. Peterson had not gone to college, but he leaned into another angle of the emerging poultry science: genetics. He kept detailed notes on his own chickens and perused scholarly studies. Eventually, he hired a team of geneticists. When he was inducted into the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame, the citation noted Peterson’s breakthrough recognition that “feed efficiency” was a heritable trait. He realized that you could, in other words, breed birds across generations that got better and better at turning food into body mass. Less input, more output.