The top four packing companies in the United States, accounting for 85% of beef slaughtering in the United States (Cargill, National Beef/Marfrig, JBS and Tyson Foods), are now well along in the process of drastically downsizing their facilities, leaving cattlemen, and the remaining few family farm dairymen, with nowhere to go to market their livestock. Public interest be damned. The cuts in thousands of packing-house jobs are devastating counties across the Farmbelt.
Tyson Foods on Aug. 13 abruptly issued job termination orders to 2500 workers in the Quad Cities area, with the immediate shutdown of its Joslin, Illinois plant, which had slaughtered some 3,000 head a day. It was in operation for 43 years. The workers’ last check will be Oct. 12. Cattlemen in the Iowa and Illinois hinterland are slammed immediately: where will their cattle go? Cattle feeders face hauling market-ready stock out of state 200 to 400 miles or more.
Tyson’s statement on its Joslin shutdown was simple, saying that cattle “supply constraints are likely to persist, requiring strategic action.” The company announced shutting another plant in Utah, and putting a Washington plant up for sale. “This will position the company for long-term success.” The company said it will anchor its whole operation at three mega hubs: Dakota City, Nebraska, Holcomb, Kansas, and Amarillo, Texas.
The Federal government—both President “Farmers love me” Trump, and the opposition “We love farmers” Democrats alike—offers sub-zero solutions. The Washington gum-flapping favoring local and regional meat processing has resulted in only token support, with no action for anti-trust application to the cartel packers, and no serious support for the ranchers, etc. How to rebuild herds is the question to be addressed. For example, the policy group Farm Action, in June released a white paper, “Lowering Beef Prices while Rebuilding America’s Cattle Sector.”
Meantime, new, huge, top-down British East India-style operations are underway, such as Walmart opening its directly-owned beef processing plant in Kansas in 2025.
The volume of beef production in the U.S. has gone from 26,003 million pounds in 2025, down to a projected 24,967 million lbs for 2026, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Aug. 12 monthly report. The U.S. national cattle herd is at its lowest since the 1950s, a decline in numbers which is not compensated for by higher meat yields per head. The leading bogus excuse for the decline in cattle numbers is drought from “climate change,” but if water management infrastructure had been built for the last 80 years as originally planned, water for irrigation and livestock would be plentiful.
Some 20% of U.S. beef consumption is currently imported, none of which would be necessary if U.S. ranchers and farmers were supported to rebuild herds. Some of the imports are blatant political payoffs, such as Trump’s waiver of any tariffs on incoming beef from Argentina, whose President Milei is ruining his own country’s economy while supporting the world war party. Trump has waived tariffs on beef from Brazil, trying to sideswipe Brazil’s President Lula da Silva before the national elections.
Diane Sare, independent candidate for President, points to the U.S. beef/cattle crisis as another expression of the “neo-feudalism phase” of breakdown of Western national economies, after decades of down shift from the American System favoring national-interest policies, down to casino-style practices, favoring billionaires and unpayable debts. In the process, the lack of infrastructure has been falsely called a “climate crisis.” Now the U.S. and parts of Europe are at the even lower phase of the downshift, seeing absolute cuts in production and availability of food, power, water, transport, and other basics. The Dutch farmers have taken to the streets to protest this month. Neo-feudalism, Sare said, is evil disregard for whether people have the means of existence.
Sare’s Aug. 14 weekly Friday webcast addressed this, with Bob Baker of the Schiller Institute and a North Country New York farmer, in a discussion, “Farmers for Sanity!”
