Poultry Visionary

Dr. Bruce Stewart-Brown (’85)
Bruce Stewart-Brown has changed the way the poultry industry raises chickens. But the road hasn't been all that easy. Early in his tenure at Perdue Farms, Stewart-Brown suggested the company work on having "happy chickens," a comment met with a great deal of skepticism. Stewart-Brown worked hard to win over the skeptics because as he puts it... "a happy chicken is a more efficient chicken that produces a better quality product." When he first made that suggestion, all of Perdue's birds received antibiotics. Today that figure is only about two percent. "We weren't the first company to forgo using growth promotion and preventive type antibiotics but we were the first large scale production company to do so," he said. "We did it and we did it the right way."