Khalid Cannon still remembers the sights and smells from his grandparents’ chicken farm in Egypt, Alabama where he grew up.
It was a big, open piece of land with eight chicken houses, he recalls. His grandmother would pay him $5 per house to keep the spaces clean. The smell of manure was terrible, but he was happy for the opportunity to earn some cash.
“So, my grandparents had four, and then my great aunt and uncle had four,” Cannon said. “There were about 25,000 chickens in each one of those, and so you had me learning how to ride a bike, riding through trails of all these different houses and there’s 200,000 chickens chirping and screaming right next to me.