Los Banos Rotary Club History
New Type Chicken On Coast Market

Development of a new breed and marketing plan of trying chicken for the west coast was explained to members of the Rotary Club Tuesday noon by Ralph Reesman, branch manager of the Swift & Company packing plant at Fresno.
While most people think of frying chickens only as they are found in the market and on the table, Reesman explained that the industry is becoming very specialized and of increasing importance to the state.

Some years ago most of the country's frying chickens came from the Midwest where they were an accessory crop on almost every farm. Then a group of New York men undertook to specialize on frying chickens for the New York market and developed a highly specialized industry that now supplies some 125 million chickens a year to a metropolitan area of less than 40 square miles.

In 1945, Reesman said, his company realized a similar potential market on the west coast and after thorough investigation, selected the Fresno area as having the most suitable soil and climatic operations for their base of operations. They have since constructed a large packing house there and interested a number of growers in the specialized frying chicken business.
In their eastern operations the company found that by crossing a New Hampshire hen with a Barred Rock cockerel they could produce a bird of superior taste and flavor, and the basic stock for their new industry here was imported from Kingston, New Hampshire.

This cross-bred bird, Reesman said, costs the grower 17 ½ cents each as a day-old chick. It consumes approximately 12 pounds of feed during its 10 to 11 week growing period and weighs about 3 ½ pounds when ready for market. The grower's actual cost is about 90 cents a bird.

In the company's modern plant the birds are killed, dressed, immediately chilled to 38 degrees and loaded on refrigerated trucks for the San Francisco and Los Angeles markets, where they are on sale in the retail markets the next morning. Thus, Reesman said, for the first time in California, city folks are able to buy freshly dressed birds of superior quality in the market.

Reesman declared that Californians last year consumed some 150 million frying chickens, of which only one-third were raised in this state. Further, he said, though California has a per-capita income some 20 per cent greater than the national average, the annual per-capita chicken consumption in this state is but 10 pounds per person, compared with 22 pounds per person in New York state. The reason for this difference, Reesman reasons, is that Californians generally have not been able to purchase a bird of comparable taste and quality with that being offered today.

July 12, 1949

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