"It would have been a big blow to us to have had to lay off our workers, both for us personally and for them," reflects Harley Sietsema of Allendale, Mich., one of the organizers of the Michigan Turkey Producers Cooperative. Some of the family farms had raised turkeys since the early 1900s, and the Bil Mar shutdown appeared to signal an end to a way of life.
A few Bil Mar suppliers switched to broiler production or other pursuits, but most cast their lots together to see if building their own processing facility was a viable option. "We exercised some short-term options to maintain our farm workforces, but we had no long-term options at first," says Sietsema, who raises 1.25 million turkeys a year. Short-term contracts to supply West Liberty Foods in Iowa and Farbest Foods in southern Indiana enabled the farmers to maintain their workforce in 1999, "but we were financially spinning our wheels," he says.