City Slickers Spurn Rat Race For Good Life Ex-Computer Chip Designer Finds Peace, Contentment Farming In Ozark Mountains
Allen Carr was living the good life in Colorado with a loving wife and family, a wellpaying job and a $200,000 house on five acres in the mountains. But he wasn’t happy.
Stress brought on by 50-hour-plus weeks designing computer chips for military aircraft, including the space shuttle, was taking a toll. He often arrived home exhausted, with little time to spend with his son and daughter.
“The money was real good, but I got so sick of the politics and the pressures,” Carr said.
So Allen and Linda Carr did something daring. The city-raised electrical engineer, whose agriculture expertise consisted of growing tomatoes in his garden, and his wife, a nurse, quit their jobs in January 1994 and moved to the Ozarks. They bought a farm and became, of all things, chicken and cattle farmers.
The real-life takeoff on “Green Acres,” the old TV series, “fits us like it was predestined to happen,” said the 36-year-old Carr.
The Carrs’ eyes light up when they talk about their first year as novice farmers, from that anxious day when the initial truckload of 90,000 day-old chicks rumbled up the driveway to the birth of their first calf.
“We love being farmers,” said Mrs. Carr, 38, although she shudders at one of her duties - pulling the heads off diseased and dying chicks, a preferred industry method of euthanization.
Carr had worked for United Technologies Micro Electronics Center, a defense contractor in Colorado Springs. When he told a friend he wanted a job offering fresh air and no computers, she mentioned a friend in Texas raised chickens for Tyson Foods Inc., the Arkansas-based poultry giant.
“Linda and I looked at each other like, ‘Ding!”’ Carr said.
The two city slickers called a tollfree number listed on a package of Tyson chicken and eventually were put in touch with officials at the company’s plant at Monett, in the heart of Missouri’s thriving poultry belt.
Tyson and other area poultry companies listened politely but rejected the couple’s offer to move to the area and become contract growers.
“They said they didn’t want to take a chance on somebody who’s never been a farmer, who doesn’t know what they’re doing,” Mrs. Carr said.
But the Carrs had done plenty of research and were determined to go to Missouri as poultry farmers. In July 1993, Mrs. Carr left her family behind, took a job at the Monett hospital and began scouting for a farm.
Meanwhile, Tyson changed its mind and agreed to contract with the Carrs if they found a suitable farm. They did - an 80-acre former dairy farm, including a four-bedroom house, barn and outbuildings - for $120,000.
The Carrs had four 40-by-400-foot brooder houses built, where chicks supplied by Tyson grow into 4-pound broilers in six weeks. The company also provides feed and technical advice.
“I basically manage the chicks and care for them,” Carr said. “One semitruck brings 93,000 baby chicks, and they leave for the processing plant 42 days later on 17 semi-trucks.”
The Carrs chuckle at the memory of their first shipment of chicks.
“We were walking around in a daze,” she said. “We didn’t sleep. They just said, ‘Do this and do this.’ Each day Tyson would help us get through another day, and eventually we started relaxing.”
The Carrs grew so confident they decided to buy 20 head of cattle - even though they knew less about cattle than chickens.
“I’ve been pestering the Extension agent on the cattle,” Carr said, referring to the University of Missouri Extension Service, which acts as a consultant to farmers. “It’s been: ‘What the heck do you do with these things? I don’t know anything about them.’ And I still don’t know anything, but they’re having babies - my bull did his thing.”
Although they don’t make nearly as much money as they did in Colorado, the Carrs said their lives are much richer as flatland farmers.
“We gave up a big, beautiful house, but do you know what we got in return?” Mrs. Carr said. “A big, beautiful quality of life. It’s not even a comparison.”