Wakefield, RI.
By Michael A. Rice
During the 1928 presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover made as his campaign slogan “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”. Just about every presidential campaign has promises for continued or new prosperity for the voters, but it seems odd to us today that the least expensive choice at the supermarket meat counter could be the most apt metaphor for trickle-down economics in the Roaring ‘20s. However if one looked at the retail price of chicken those days and expressed it in current dollars, it would be upwards of $10 per pound! Hardly in the reach of most working Americans, save for the most special of occasions.
Considerable developments in poultry husbandry, distribution and marketing had to occur before it could fulfill Hoover’s campaign promise and become our ubiquitous chicken nuggets, barbeque and fried food staple as well as serving as the entrée of choice at countless political fundraisers. One of the most important of the developments was the control of a protozoan parasite disease known as coccidiosis that would routinely decimate entire flocks of birds at the farm.
During the 1930s, sulfonamide antibiotics or sulfa drugs were first developed in Germany and were quickly adopted in the United States as an alternative to penicillin. During WWII, the sulfa drugs proved invaluable on the battlefield to prevent wound infection, thus saving countless lives. During the war, Dr. John Weijlard, a chemist at Merck and Company first synthesized a new sulfa drug sulfaquinoxaline (SQ) as part of a company program to develop anti-malarial drugs. Merck patented the drug in 1946. Unfortunately, studies conducted by Dr. A. Ericson of Merck showed that SQ was too toxic to be used in humans so they began to consider research into using SQ as a veterinary drug against related protozoan parasites.
During the 1930s and 1940s, one of the nation’s leading research institutions in Poultry Science was the University of Rhode Island (after all, Rhode Island’s state bird is the only one from the barnyard!) During the mid-1940s Dr. David F. Green of Merck made contact with Dr. John P. Delaplane a poultry disease specialist at URI’s Agricultural Experiment Station at East Farm in Kingston. That meeting led to a series of experiments that conclusively showed that SQ was a very effective drug to combat poultry coccidiosis. The ability to control poultry coccidiosis was one of the most important developments leading to the ability of farmers to increase the size of their flocks and make poultry much cheaper for the consuming public. Today the farmgate value (or prices paid to farmers) of chicken is less than $0.50 per pound…a small fraction of the relative price during Hoover’s presidential campaign.
The economic impact of Delaplane’s discovery along with his industrial partners from Merck has been gigantic. During the 1952 sixtieth anniversary celebration of the founding of URI, then President Carl Woodward proclaimed the economic gains by poultry farmers had exceeded the entire operating budget of the University since its founding. Indeed, in USDA’s 2004 annual census of agriculture, combined broiler, chicken and egg production in the United States was worth $83.7 billion.
Ironically, the success of Delaplane’s work to control coccidiosis may have led to the decline of the poultry industry in Rhode Island and the demise of the Poultry Science Program at the University of Rhode Island. To be economically viable, the agricultural industry in Rhode Island must rely on high-value crops or livestock to offset high costs from relatively small and expensive farmland. At the present farmgate values for chickens or eggs, it is difficult for Rhode Island farmers to compete with large industrial chicken farms on the Delmarva Peninsula and elsewhere in the major agricultural states of the Midwest. By the late1960s, the last research flocks were gone from East Farm and the last poultry scientist retired from the URI faculty in 1992. Some of the research coops to hold Delaplane’s chickens still stand at East Farm and are in use as storage rooms for gear related to URI’s current research work in fisheries and aquaculture.
On this sixtieth anniversary of the sulfaquinoxaline patent, it’s worthwhile to reflect on the significance of URI’s contribution to other sectors of Rhode Island’s economy and the lives of Rhode Islanders. The fruitful partnership between a URI researcher with the pharmaceutical industry and poultry farmers is a an excellent example of how research at a public Land Grant and Sea Grant Universities can lead to real economic development through our research and public outreach missions. Today the economic and scientific opportunities are different, but the general philosophy of the University has not changed. We relish the opportunity to forge partnerships, solve problems and build a strong Rhode Island economy.
Michael A. Rice, an occasional contributor, is a professor of fisheries and aquaculture at the University of Rhode Island and serves as chairman of the URI Faculty Senate.