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Caught Our Eye

Cotton turns to pork farmer to beef up his staff

Posted by J. Todd Foster on April 29, 2016

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has hired the caretaker for the Arkansas Razorbacks' mascot as his agriculture project manager.

New staff member Keith Stokes also is the former president of the Arkansas Pork Producers Association. And he's had plenty of beefs with chicken giant Tyson Foods Inc., especially when the poultry firm restructured in 2002 and closed its company-owned and leased hog farms. More than 80 farmers, including Stokes, sued Tyson.

Stokes' wife woke him up back then to "tell me that our production manager had called to say that Tyson was pulling the hogs off of our farm. Our lives have been in constant turmoil ever since," Stokes told the Sioux City Journal.

Tyson settled the case in 2005 by paying $42.5 million to the 85 contract hog farmers who alleged the company had defrauded them after they built facilities to raise hogs for Tyson.

Stokes and his family began caring for the University of Arkansas mascot, a Russian boar, in the early 1990s when the school decided to beef up fan excitement. The current mascot is "Tusk IV," from the same lineage as the original mascot. "We try to copy it kind of like the royal family has always done," Stokes told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a 2010 interview. "Razorback fans everywhere own a piece of him. We just get to take care of him."