And yet here's Fortenberry today, helping making it financially possible, through one full-tuition scholarship and two scholarship endowments, for students to attend Auburn University, the school he always loved to hate.

The poultry connection—that's what's done it.

It was the poultry industry that years ago put Fortenberry on the track that eventually led to his phenomenal success with his Crossville-based company, D&F Equipment Sales Inc. And he's well aware that AU's poultry science program, ranked as one of the tops in the country, has had a significant positive impact on enhancing poultry production in the state and nation.

The Auburn scholarships, Fortenberry says, are his way “of giving back to an industry and an institution that've done so much for me.”

“It's hard for me to say it, but some of the finest people on earth I know are Auburn people,” Fortenberry says. “These (scholarships) are a way of not forgetting where I came from.”

Fortenberry's remarkable story of building a small service company into a global food-handling equipment corporation began a few decades ago, when he landed a $1.61-per-hour job on a cleanup crew for a poultry processor in Gadsden. Before long, he moved to the maintenance crew, and from there to supervisor, and so on and so on.

In 1987, he took a giant leap of faith when he and a business partner started D&F Equipment, a company specializing in the installation and service of poultry processing equipment.

“Within a year, though, our customers were saying, ‘Y'all know as much or more about this equipment as the companies that make it do,' and they were asking us why we didn't just start building the equipment ourselves,” Fortenberry says.

So Fortenberry, who by then had bought out his partner and owned the company 100 percent, did just that.

Today D&F bills itself as “your number one source for food handling equipment.” Besides laying claim to being the largest such company for the poultry industry, D&F in recent years has made significant inroads into the beef, pork, fish, bakery and pharmaceutical industries as well.

D&F is a turnkey operation, with teams handling engineering—“that's our forte,” Fortenberry says—as well as fabrication, installation and parts. Oh, and service. Above all, service.

“The service side is what this company is all about, what sets us apart from the crowd; we live and die by it,” Fortenberry says. “Our aspiration is to make every customer's life a little better for knowing us.”

Besides the service factor, though, there's another key component to D&F's success. It's faith, religion, spirituality—whatever you choose to call it—and Fortenberry makes absolutely no apologies for that. In fact, in its mission statement, the company holds that it promotes “an ethical and moral lifestyle,” and it pledges to “strive to foster an ever-higher degree of ethics and morality among our associates and to promote Christ-like behavior in all of our company decisions and actions.”

All of his successes, whether in business, health or family, Fortenberry attributes completely to God. Indeed, Larry Fortenberry has been blessed.

He's a firm believer in sharing those blessings, too, with others who may be less fortunate. Take the Auburn scholarships, for instance.

Five years ago, Fortenberry created the D&F Foundation to fund a full-tuition scholarship for an AU student majoring in poultry science or a related field. More recently, he established two scholarship endowments in honor of his two older children, Larry Lynn Fortenberry, who is vice president of D&F, and Dawn Fortenberry Knox, chief financial officer and office manager. The earnings on those endowments will fund partial scholarships to poultry science majors.

Fortenberry's future plans call for setting up a third scholarship endowment, in honor of his youngest child, Brad.

The funding for the endowments and scholarship comes from a highly successful annual golf tournament that the D&F Foundation launched in 1999.

“I had been playing in tournaments here and there sponsored by different businesses and groups, and one day I walked off the course after one of them and told my team, ‘We're gonna have us a golf tournament, and we're gonna do it to raise money to help people,'” Fortenberry recalls.

Like the five before it, this August's sixth D&F Invitational Charity Golf Classic should net $25,000-$30,000, Fortenberry says.

Half of those proceeds will go toward the scholarships, to help make college more affordable for limited-resource poultry science majors at Auburn. These scholarships, Fortenberry stresses, are not for the standout, dean's list students.

“These are for average students who didn't get scholarships because of their grades or test scores or how well they can play sports, and whose families are struggling to put them through college.”

And what of the other half of the money raised? It will be used to help individuals and families who need medical care or supplies but don't have health insurance. Over the years, that portion of the proceeds has been used to pay for such items as a van with hydraulic lift, hearing aids, wheelchair ramps on homes, even first-time dental care for four abandoned children in the community. D&F takes applications for the assistance dollars. The toughest part, Fortenberry says, is having to turn some down.

The D&F golf tournament, held at Silver Lake, a Robert Trent Jones course in Glencoe, is rightly named when they call it a classic.

“Every year, people tell us it's the best golf tournament they've ever played in,” Fortenberry says. “Our people know how to put on a golf tournament.”

About 50 teams will be participating in this year's classic, and probably close to that many will be on a waiting list.

“Folks know what this one goes toward, and they support that,” Fortenberry says.

For information on the 2005 tournament, call 1-800-282-7842.      
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