Spotlight on Tyson Foods

Tyson Foods is one of the world’s largest food companies with its primary business being the meat of cows, chickens, and pigs. ​​The company supplies these products to chains including Walmart, McDonalds, KFC, and Taco Bell, as well as to schools and prisons. Not only is Tyson Foods one of the biggest companies in the US, it is one of the richest, with an annual revenue in excess of $50 billion. The company was founded in 1935 by John W. Tyson and today his grandson is chairman of the board of directors, alongside his two children. The family’s personal wealth is estimated at $2.5 billion—a huge amount to make from the factory farming and slaughter of animals.

Tyson Foods and Factory Farming

Tyson has contracts with 3,700 intensive chicken farmers in the United States, but it’s an uneven relationship because the farmers have little say in many aspects of their work. They must source the chicks and feed only from the Tyson, while bearing significant financial risk by providing the farm, infrastructure, and labor. Their significant investment while being tied into contracts has raised concerns that farmers’ livelihoods are highly vulnerable to the business decisions of this multi-billion-dollar company.

Scandals Involving Tyson Foods

When profits trumps everything, scandals are inevitable. Tyson’s reliance on the mass farming and slaughter of billions of animals means scandals—including animal suffering, farmer exploitation, child labor, and toxic environment pollution—are anything but rare.

Farmer Exploitation

Farmers are starting to wonder if they are really farming when all they are expected to do is feed the chicks they are given with the food they are given. Farmers under Tyson contracts are not expected to think for themselves but to do what the company tells them, even though they own the land and barns, and pay their workers’ wages. This leaves them in a highly vulnerable position, and one farmer left high and dry by Tyson is Shawn Hinkle. 

Hinkle signed a contract with Tyson and borrowed more than $2.5 million to build the required chicken houses and fit them with the equipment that Tyson specified. Alongside his family and workers, Hinkle worked up to 18 hours a day to make a success of this venture. But over time, he says, the number and quality of birds delivered to him began to slip, as did the quality of the feed. With the number of birds being raised as a result declining, so did Hinkle’s profits, but there was nothing he could do about it. Then Tyson sold its local slaughterhouse to another firm on the condition that it would not slaughter chickens anymore. This maneuver left Hinkle and two other local farmers with little choice but to sue Tyson.

Tyson Worker Exploitation and Harm

To ‘process’ all the factory-farmed animals, Tyson owns and operates slaughterhouses across the country. In 2021, an investigation revealed that the company cancelled some of the workers’ breaks and bonuses and introduced a points-based disciplinary system to pressure employees to comply with obligatory overtime—an act that kept many fearful employees working even when they were injured or sick. 

Slaughterhouses are dangerous places, but the investigation alleged that speed and output targets were prioritized over employee welfare. Things did not improve. In 2024, a separate investigation found a long history of ammonia leaks at Tyson Foods processing plants that had caused severe injuries to 150 workers in 47 separate incidents. Since 2013, OSHA has cited Tyson facilities over 90 times for violations of chemical handling and training deficiencies. As well as toxic poisoning, workers at Tyson plants have been crushed, suffered life-altering injuries, and died.

Deaths at Tyson Plants

Sadly, there have also been far too many deaths at Tyson’s plants, including:

• Cleaner James A. Currier, 38, died at Tyson’s Tennessee plant after falling into machinery in 2015.
• In 2019, Warren Jay Slaton, 34, died at a Tyson plant in Texas after being crushed between loading pallets.
• Thirty-nine year old Carlos Lynn became “caught in a pinch-point of the equipment,” and was decapitated at the Alabama plant in 2020.
• Also in 2020, 30-year-old Kendrick Gregory, a maintenance worker, died at a Tyson plant in Kansas when he was pulled into the machinery by his harness.
• Maintenance worker Bobby Bragg, 58, was killed in an industrial accident at a Tyson plant in Georgia in 2021.
• Casen Garcia, a 22-year-old who worked at Tyson’s Illinois plant, died in 2022 after being electrocuted.
• Jason W. Bare was hit by a tractor-trailer rig and died at the North Carolina plant in 2022.
• In 2024, Bajarma Batozhapov, the 61-year-old wife of a worker, died at a Georgia plant when a boiler exploded, also injuring workers.
• Also in 2024, an industrial accident at a Tyson plant in Kansas left an unnamed 44-year old man dead.
• Another un-named worker died in a workplace accident at Tyson’s Nebraska plant in 2025.

Tyson and Child Labor

In May 2025, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley launched an investigation into Tyson Foods after a former employee alleged that two children were employed at the company’s Arkansas chicken meatpacking plant. This is not the first time Tyson Foods has been connected to child labor. In 2022, a sanitation company that provided cleaners to Tyson (as well as JBS, Cargill and others across eight states) was fined more than a million dollars for employing 100 children. Some of those children suffered chemical burns.

Tyson, Lobbying, and Corruption

When it comes to corruption and political lobbying, some of Tyson’s lowlights include:

• Making illegal gifts to serving Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, who was overhauling the meat and poultry inspection system at the time. Tyson pleaded guilty and was fined $6 million. 
• Supporting Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, an association which raised concerns when Clinton acknowledged he had sacrificed the environment to allow more chicken farms to be built in Arkansas.
• Agreeing to pay a $4-million criminal penalty to resolve allegations of bribing foreign officials.
• Spending big on politics, investing a total of nearly $18m in lobbying and more than $300,000 in campaign contributions per election cycle since 2010. The majority is spent in Arkansas, one of the leading poultry-producing states.
• Amassing multiple price-fixing or anti-competition offenses.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, you may have read our blog on JBS, another powerful meat firm with a history of corruption and dodgy dealings. The factory farming industry is as murky as the water it pollutes.

Tyson and Environmental Pollution

Farming animals for food is renowned for the pollution it causes to both water and air, and as one of the largest companies farming animals, Tyson’s pollution is enormous. A 2025 investigation revealed that Tyson Foods had dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into America’s rivers and lakes over the previous five years, threatening critical ecosystems, and endangering both wildlife and human health. Far from being unprecedented, it looks like this was very much business as usual.

Factory farms are also key sources of highly damaging air pollution. Toxic pollutants released include hydrogen sulfide (which at high doses can cause eye problems and breathing difficulties), ammonia (which causes respiratory problems), particulate pollution (which can trigger asthma and heart attacks), and volatile organic compounds (which can cause headaches, nausea, and increased risk of cancer).

And then there is the pollution that drives climate change through the release of CO₂ and methane. Farming animals for human consumption is responsible for at least 14.5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Tyson is responsible for 28 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, which is equivalent to six million cars on the road.

Tyson Foods and Animal Suffering

Factory farming creates billions of animal victims. In the relentless drive for profit, animals are afforded just the barest of necessities that will keep enough animals alive long enough to slaughter them. Those sentient beings are forced to live in barren, overcrowded barns, with nothing to occupy their bright minds. They are denied freedom, fresh air, and the earth beneath their feet. They are denied the ability to move their muscles, to form friendship bonds, to play, or to choose a mate. They undergo painful but legal mutilations and are slaughtered at a fraction of their lifespan. Millions do not survive the ordeal and die untreated and uncared for on the floor of the factory farm. This system of production is cruel in the extreme but it is the norm for Tyson’s chickens and pigs.

Beyond the routine suffering, there are many breaches of the weak welfare laws, in which animals are deliberately harmed and abused. Investigations into Tyson farms have found:

• Birds being thrown, punched, and kicked by workers
• Birds being run over by a worker with farm equipment
• A worker ripping the head off a chicken
• Catchers throwing birds like balls
• Birds stabbed, clubbed and stomped on 
• A worker driving a forklift over a cage full of chickens, crushing and killing most of them

Conclusion 

If you care about small farms surviving, workers’ rights, animals’ rights and welfare, the climate, clean water and air, or a political system free from undue influence by the wealthiest and dirtiest industries, we urge you to boycott Tyson Foods and all other factory farming businesses.