khou.com Houston
Cargill Beef announced Thursday that it will idle one of its two West Texas meatpacking plants and lay off all 2,000 workers because of a tight cattle supply following years of drought.
The number of cattle in the U.S. has been dropping for years, but the pace accelerated during the past two years as ranchers in central and southwestern states sold off millions of animals they couldn't afford to feed after drought dried up pastures and sent the prices of hay and other feed skyrocketing. The slaughter began to slow in the fall as many ranchers tried to hold on to the relatively few cattle they had left.
Ranchers have said it will take years to rebuild their herds once the drought ends, and Cargill said it didn't expect business to rebound soon.
"The decision to idle our Plainview beef processing plant was a difficult and painful one to make and was made only after we conducted an exhaustive analysis of the regional cattle supply and processing capacity situation in North America," Cargill President John Keating said in the release.
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