Sean Dengler.

Around 3,000 individuals will be out of job and the processing of 5,000 head of cattle per day will disappear, which is about 4.8% of the daily U.S. beef slaughter after Tyson announced they were closing their beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, according to DTN Progressive Farmer. While Tyson said they would convert a Texas beef facility to a single, full-capacity shift and increase production at other beef facilities, this Nebraska town where Tyson’s employees make up almost a third of the town’s total population. This will lead to devastation.

This comes at the expense of an industry known for its monopoly power. One would think a company that is as large and “efficient” as Tyson would not be losing up to $600 million in its beef business this year according to Yahoo! Finance. When economists or analysts claim bigger is better, like other industries, it is painfully obvious this is not the case across the board. Maybe at one point Tyson was well-run to put themselves in this market position, but at this point, this bloated company is far too large to have this much power over people’s lives.

By closing this plant, Tyson leaves cattle farmers with less locations to market their animals. This is on the heels of the reduction of the United States cattle herd. The herd is at its lowest levels since the 1950s due in no small part to the consolidation of meatpackers. This consolidation enabled the meatpackers to gain more power over the supply chain across all animals. Farmers used to own their chickens and hogs to now where farmers sell their services to grow an animal. Due to this consolidation, meatpackers retain control over most parts of the production of the livestock besides the riskiest part like investing in the land and infrastructure.

Meatpackers have used and abused farmers for many years, and finally, when cattle farmers were experiencing the best prices in years, the bully at the playground, Tyson, decides to take its ball and go home. Closing this plant reduces sell locations and allows the closest other meatpacking locations to offer price due to the decrease in competition. Hopefully, this Lexington plant does not meet the same fate as the one in Cherokee where Tyson sat on the plant for a few years before letting another competitor use it, according to the Des Moines Register.

This sense of entitlement from Tyson to inflict as much pain on cattle farmers and try to dip out stage left is insulting. All this woe-is-me for Tyson comes after the 2022 Census of Agriculture revealed between 2017-2022, 107,000 beef cattle farms and ranches left the industry. This is over 21,000 cattle producers per year. This is as if the city of Altoona disappeared each year.

I feel for the employees who will lose their job, the devastation to the community if the plant sits empty for far too long, and all the cattle farmers looking for another place to sell cattle. It is imperative to stand up to these meatpackers by breaking them up, creating more competition in the meatpacking industry in a more regionalized manner, enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act, reforming commodity checkoff programs, and re-instituting mandatory country of origin labeling, are ways to help farmers and all Americans regain control from this monopoly power. This will not be easy. The good news is Americans have broken up big business before, and Americans can do it again.

Sean Dengler is a writer, comedian, now-retired beginning farmer, and host of the Pandaring Talk podcast who grew up on a farm between Traer and Dysart. You can reach him at sean.h.dengler@gmail.com.