Donnie Smith, Former Tyson Foods CEO, Credits Servant-Leader Model for His Success
Fryar Price Risk Management Center begins Future of Arkansas Agriculture and Beyond speaker series
By John Lovett – Nov. 10, 2025
PEACH TREE MODEL — Donnie Smith explains his peach tree model of servant leadership in the Fryar Price Risk Management Center of Excellence’s Future of Arkansas Agriculture and Beyond speaker series. (U of A Sytem Division of Agriculture photo by Lauren Sutherland)
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Chief executive officers shouldn’t think of themselves as the top of a pyramid, but rather the trunk of a tree, said Donnie Smith, former CEO of Tyson Foods.
Smith was the inaugural speaker in the Fryar Price Risk Management Center of Excellence’s new Future of Arkansas Agriculture and Beyond series. The center, led by agricultural economics and agribusiness department head Lanier Nalley, is a unit of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Ed Fryar, the former economics professor for whom the center is named, said Smith led Tyson Foods to a six-fold increase in its stock price between 2009 and 2017. There were only six other companies with a Fortune 100 ranking at the time with a similar performance: Apple, Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, Google and Microsoft.
“If you think about those six companies, you had e-commerce, you had financial services, you had technology companies,” Fryar said. “Those are the types of companies that you expect to grow fast. You do not expect an asset-based operating company in the food business to grow that fast. That record was an incredible record.”
Amending the culture
After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in animal science, Smith started work for Tyson Foods as a broiler service technician, assisting broiler chicken farmers. Within a few years, he was managing a feed mill for the company, and every few years afterward was promoted until he was named the CEO in 2009.
Around 2010 is when Smith said he was able to begin fully integrating what he called his “peach tree model” of servant leadership. He did meet resistance, but it paid off.
“I had some people walking out of the conference room going ‘I’m leaving. He’s crazy. This is the meat industry. You can’t be nice,’” Smith said. “That year, we made significant progress in changing our leadership style, and it was to date, the most profitable year in the company’s history.”
While the pyramid structure is driven by “fear and pride,” he said the peach tree model is driven by the opposite — “courage and humility” — which should permeate the culture, or “the soil” of an organization.
“When I look at an organization, I don’t really see a pyramid. I see a peach tree,” Smith said. “Who’s the star of the show of this model? The peaches … It’s all about the peaches.”
Pointing to a pyramid he drew on a whiteboard with the CEO at the top and several senior executives under it, he asked, “Where are the peaches? They’re getting bruised and squished by all that ego. Everybody’s looking out for themselves. Nobody is looking out for the peaches.”
Smith turned and looked at his drawing of a peach tree on a different board and asked “Where’s the CEO in this model? Right here,” he says, pointing to the trunk. “Here, the CEO and leadership provide stability, structure, direction and resources.”
“That’s what a CEO does,” Smith said. “And the CEO’s role is to support people who support people who support the peaches who do the work.”
Creating an environment and culture without fear or pride led to the successes, Smith said, although some where what he called “fail forwards.” His research and development team took a risk on a product with a special cut of meat. While the product was initially deemed a failure and cost the company about a half million dollars, what they learned from the project laid the groundwork for a “dramatically higher quality and better yield on a portion.” The project ended up leading to a $15 million success, he said.
Smith said throughout his career he has been encouraged to walk out his Christian faith in the workplace and quoted several scriptures on biblical guidance, including Proverbs 27:23 and Ecclesiastes 9:10, which speak to leadership and work ethic, respectively.
Addressing the theme of the speaker series, Smith said that although he does not know a lot about the future of agriculture, he is confident that the servant leadership model is the way to go despite its level of difficulty.
“Is it easy? No. It’s not easy, because you spend most of your time telling yourself ‘no’ so that you can say yes to someone else,” Smith said. “And it’s hard for us to do that, to deny yourself. You have to. Because what matters most is the peaches.”
Feeding the hungry
What Smith said he does know about the future of agriculture is that the planet’s population is expected to increase by about 2 billion people in the next 25 years and more efficiency is needed in food production.
“Depending on who you talk to, we’re using 1.5 planets’ worth of resources to feed the people on the planet today,” Smith said. “And most of the population growth is going to be in the developing world … So how are you going to basically double food production or dramatically limit food waste, and get back to only needing one planet’s worth of resources to feed one planet’s worth of people, and not leave anybody behind?”
Smith admits he doesn’t have all the answers but has been doing what he can to feeding the hungry. Fryar said Smith was the driving force behind “Tworore Inkoke, Twunguke,” a program in Rwanda that teaches people who to grow chickens. The name translates to “Let’s raise chickens and make a profit.” Smith and his wife Terry started the African Sustainable Agriculture Project in 2012 to work towards providing support to agricultural development in Africa.
It’s a fitting contribution for Smith, whose work in Arkansas with poultry contributed to the state consistently ranking as one of the top poultry producers in the United States. Arkansas’ agriculture sector accounts for 14 percent of the state’s gross domestic product and almost $14 billion in cash receipts, said Deacue Fields, head of the Division of Agriculture. To put that in perspective, Fields said the combined cash receipts from the agriculture sectors in all its neighboring states do not equal those of Arkansas.
“Agriculture is a big deal in Arkansas,” said Fields, a former agricultural economics professor. “However, we are still in the wake of facing some grand challenges in agriculture that we all must be prepared to address.”
For example, Fields said that despite the size and importance of agriculture in Arkansas, the state is “still the most food insecure state in the country and we’re the third-most obese state in the nation.” A 4.4-percent decline in the state’s rural population and “strains on row-crop farmers” are additional challenges, he said.
“The Arkansas agricultural economy is experiencing some historic challenges,” Fields said. “However, these challenges are what land-grant universities were designed to tackle.”
A recording of Smith’s presentation can be found at the Division of Agriculture’s YouTube channel. Thomas Gist Jr. was the inspiration for the new speaker series.
To learn more about the Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website. Follow us on 𝕏 at @ArkAgResearch, subscribe to the Food, Farms and Forests podcast and sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Arkansas Agricultural Research Report. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. Follow us on 𝕏 at @AgInArk. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.
About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three campuses.
Pursuant to 7 CFR § 15.3, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services (including employment) without regard to race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual preference, pregnancy or any other legally protected status, and is an equal opportunity institution.
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