World News
A plant built for 300 million dollars in 2019 closes as the cattle herd shrinks
By Staff Writer | 25 August 2026
Two United States beef facilities are being shut and a third put up for sale. One of them opened seven years ago and was designed to employ up to 1,200 people.
A case ready plant that cost 300 million dollars to build in 2019 is being closed along with a much older beef facility in Illinois, in a restructuring driven by the smallest national cattle supply in more than sixty years. The company set out the decision in a current report filed with the securities regulator on 13 August.
The filing states that operations will end at the beef facility at Joslin, Illinois and at the beef and pork case ready facility at Eagle Mountain, Utah, that the beef facility at Pasco, Washington is being offered for sale, and that a second shift will be added at Amarillo, Texas as cattle become available. In its own statement the company said it would anchor the business around three plants in the central states, at Dakota City in Nebraska, Holcomb in Kansas and Amarillo in Texas.
A seven year old asset
The Eagle Mountain plant is the part of this that should interest anyone who builds industrial capacity. It was put up in 2019 at a stated cost of 300 million dollars, opened with 800 jobs and was designed to take 1,200 when fully loaded. Seven years later it is being closed, and it has not been said how many of those jobs go with it.
Joslin is the older site and the larger loss of employment. It is reported as having employed about 2,500 people, and the union that represents them puts its own membership there at more than 2,000.
Over the last year, we've seen how plant closures impact rural communities, and the closure of Tyson Foods in Joslin, Illinois, is no different
Milton Jones, International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers
A plant designed for a supply of raw material that no longer exists is not a badly built plant. It is a correctly built plant in the wrong decade, and the write off falls on the party that carried the demand risk.
The arithmetic behind it
The beef business has been losing money at scale. The company expects the segment to lose between 500 million and 650 million dollars over the full financial year. In the third quarter, reported on 8 August, beef revenue fell 3.9 per cent and volumes fell 16 per cent, with an adjusted loss of 138 million dollars against 116 million a year earlier. The previous full year produced a record segment loss of 1.135 billion dollars, or 426 million on an adjusted basis.
The cause is the herd. Fewer cattle mean the packers bid against each other for a shrinking supply, which lifts the price of the input while the finished product meets a limit at the till. Analysts put the annual saving from the closures at between 100 million and 150 million dollars, which is an estimate rather than a company figure.
This is the second such step in under a year. A beef plant at Lexington in Nebraska closed from November 2025 with 3,200 jobs, in a town of about 11,500 people, and Amarillo was cut to a single shift at the same time. Amarillo is now the site being asked to take a second shift back.
What the workforce was told
The local union says it had no warning.
we were extremely disappointed in not receiving advance notice of this news
Robert O'Toole, President of UFCW Local 1546
He said the local had a long standing relationship with the company and that, given the chance, it would have looked for a way to keep the plant running. Whether an alternative existed is not something the published record answers.
The pattern is one that any contractor who has built a single purpose facility will recognise. Capacity gets located where the raw material is, and when the raw material moves or thins out, the building is stranded regardless of its condition. What is being closed at Eagle Mountain is a modern asset with a working life ahead of it, and the reason has nothing to do with the asset.