Roy Poage’s impact on the pork industry extends far beyond production practices. If it wasn’t for Poage’s ideas and out-of-the-box thinking, Jimmy Dean’s iconic sausage may never have graced the tables of homes across the country.
Poage grew up in Plainview, Texas, the same hometown as Jimmy Dean. He went to school with Jimmy’s cousin. One day the two cousins came out to see Poage’s farm. Jimmy and some of his actor friends wanted to invest in agriculture, Poage says.
“Jimmy Dean wanted to know how I would invest in agriculture if I were him,” he says. “I told him that we could build them a hog farm if they had land. We could stock it and teach his workers how to manage it. Well, I had no idea he’d actually want to do that.”
A week later, Jimmy Dean called back and said they were ready to put in a 300-sow unit. It was going well, Poage says, but in 1968, Jimmy Dean returned to Plainview to visit his mother and stopped by to see Poage again.
“He said, ‘Well, my movie buddies and I have some more money we want to put in agriculture, but we don’t want to put any more money in pigs. It’s too hard of work. It’s too hard to manage. What else can we do?’”
At this point in Poage’s career with Lubbock Swine Breeders, they were taking pigs by cesarean section and had to sacrifice the sow. Because of this, they had sows that needed harvested but packing plants wouldn’t buy them. So, Poage began making sausage with a recipe that his mother used during the Depression when his family harvested pigs for meat and sold it to neighbors and friends.
“Sows were really fat then and people didn’t like how much fat was in the sausage when they fried it,” Poage says. “So we created a recipe where we took out a little fat and left just enough to make it cook good. We had people calling us day and night wanting sausage.”
That’s why Poage told Jimmy if he got out of the pig business, he’d put in a sausage plant. He shared his sausage experience, and the rest is history, he says.
“Again, I didn’t have the idea that he would do that,” Poage laughs. “The next week, Jimmy Dean called me and said they were going into the sausage business.”
Jimmy built a plant in Plainview, Texas. Then, expanded in Iowa and Kentucky before selling out to Sara Lee, Poage says.
