A poultry company outside Arkadelphia has partnered with several southwest Arkansas counties to hatch, grow and process a “specialty chicken” popular in Asian markets across the western United States.
Hillstern Farms has leased a 30,000-SF building in Prescott and refurbished it into a hatchery for ShunTuJee chickens, small, brown birds that weigh just over four pounds when fully grown.
Once hatched at the Prescott Custom Hatchery, the chicks are transported to contract farms in Columbia County, where they are raised free-range and organically.
When mature, which takes about 12 weeks, the chickens are transported to Hillstern Farms’ Arkadelphia Poultry Plant in the Clark County Industrial Park, slaughtered and processed with their head and feet attached, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls “Buddhist-style.”
Quan Phu, owner of Hillstern Farms, said the breed is flavorful and a favorite in the Asian markets of Dallas and Houston, Seattle and a number of cities in California.
“Our market is all the Asian communities,” Phu said, adding the type of chicken production adheres to traditional Asian culture.
Poultry Federation President Marvin Childers said Hillstern’s poultry operation is unique in Arkansas, one of the top poultry producers in the United States and home to protein giant Tyson Foods Inc.
“You don’t see these very often,” he said. “It certainly is a niche market.”
Agriculture in Arkansas is a nearly $10 billion a year industry, with poultry accounting for about 40 percent, Childers said.
In 2013, Vikon Farms, a poultry processing company based in California, announced plans to purchase the former Petit Jean Poultry plant in the Clark County Industrial Park, located in Gum Springs, a few miles outside Arkadelphia.
During an event attended by then-Gov. Mike Beebe, along with state and Clark County economic development leaders, Phu, who was with Vikon at the time, said Vikon would invest $5.4 million into the facility.
The Economic Development Corporation of Clark County contributed $250,000 in incentives to help re-open the plant under the ownership of Hillstern Farms, which, Phu said, is no longer affiliated with Vikon Farms.
There are currently 40 employees working at the facility, where some ShunTuJee are being processed, as well as “stew hens” and other poultry for other companies as workers are trained, Phu said. Production of ShunTuJee will ramp up gradually as the supply of specialty chickens increases.
“It’s going to take a while,” Phu said. “Right now we continue to increase our number of production and it will depend on our production. We are producing, hatching eggs ourselves.”
Phu said he expects the plant to employ about 170 workers within four years, when production reaches its maximum. He also said he anticipates contracting additional farmers, some in Union County, to care for the chickens until they are ready for processing.
“Honestly, we feel we will gradually grow in our market without doing any competition with the big guys,” Phu said. “We are not in mass production. We are more in specialty and our process is a little bit different too.”
Along with creating the supply chain for the ShunTuJee, Phu said the plant also had to be reconfigured to meet specific needs for the Buddhist-style processing, and a special chilling system was installed.
“This [plant] was about 20 years old, and it was set up for chicken processing, not for chicken slaughterhouse,” Phu said. “So when we purchased the place, we had to convert it to a slaughterhouse. We had to put in a lot of new equipment.”
The poultry plant also is unique because it does not dunk the processed chickens in cold water vats, he said. “We add chill. We hang the chickens in a large cooling room, which avoids a lot of contamination.”
Chilling the chickens at freezing temperatures in large rooms is better than submerging poultry, which adds as much as 5 to 7 percent water weight to the bird when sold, Phu said.
Stephen Bell, president and CEO of the Arkadelphia Regional Economic Development Alliance, said the $250,000 in economic incentives for Hillstern Farms came from a half-cent economic development tax approved by county voters in 2007 and reapproved for seven years in 2014. The tax was to provide incentives to companies creating at least 10 full-time jobs that offer more than 100 percent of the county’s average prevailing wage.
“It’s a pretty unique operation … and they went into the old Petit Jean Poultry plant, which employed over 650 people before it closed,” Bell said.
Prescott Mayor Terry Oliver said Quan Phu “has come down here several times and met a lot of the leaders in the community, so it’s worked out real good.”
Prescott Custom Hatchery, in a building that once housed a pajama factory, added just “four or five” new jobs in the community, “but that building is no longer empty,” Oliver said.
Mary Godwin, director of the Prescott Nevada County Economic Development Office, said Hillstern Farms pays the city of Prescott $1,000 a month to lease the building which houses the new hatchery. She said Phu selected the 30,000-SF building for its central location.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to work with the other counties to make this happen for southwest Arkansas,” Godwin said.
Phu and his wife, Dana, co-owner of Hillstern Farms, both said that working with economic development officials in Arkansas was much easier than dealing with bureaucrats back home.
“There is a lot of red tape working with the government in California,” Phu said. “We would really like to create our own brand here — like Arkansas TuJee, that is one thing we are looking for,” Dana said.
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