SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – As Tyson Foods continues to work with cattle ranchers who were left without a destination for up to 15,000 fed beef cattle following the abrupt Aug. 13 closure of their Joslin, Ill., receiving plant, Illinois Beef Association (IBA) Executive Director Josh St. Peters is hoping to see another company step in to save the facility – and possibly many regional producers’ livelihoods.

“We still have a pretty good glut of those cattle in the countryside though producers have been working through them. Heading into (the weekend of Aug. 22-23) that number was down to around 11,000 and some more have shipped over the past couple of days,” St. Peters said Aug. 26. “My understanding is that Tyson did tell those producers that they would take those cattle for Dakota City, Neb., however there is a process in getting those cattle worked through and scheduled that could take into the month of September to sort out. In some cases, this is longer than producers can wait, so some producers have been in touch with other cattle buyers looking at what their options might be.”

The closure of the Joslin plant is sending financial ripples throughout the animal agriculture industry, according to St. Peters, who has guided IBA since 2020.

“To have a packer close a plant with no notice is a departure from Tyson’s prior precedent over the past 12 months. When they closed Lexington, Neb., they gave the community and the market two months’ notice. When they made the changes at Amarillo, I believe it was 90 days (prior notice). In Illinois, there was no advance warning; they just closed the doors and fired almost 2,700 people,” he said.

As for the local employees affected by the closure, St. Peters noted that under the WORN Act employers must provide their full-time employees with 60 days of commensurate pay if companies fail to provide prior notice of a business closure to their workers. In the case of the farmers, however, there were no protections.

“They acknowledge there were commitments to these cattle (that were) apparently not interpreted as a contract,” St. Peters said of Tyson Foods, which reportedly had cattle buyers in the area of the plant making verbal purchase commitments to producers as recently as three days before the Joslin plant’s closure. “These producers are now left with sorting out what to do.”

Also on Aug. 13, Tyson Foods announced the impending sale of its Pasco, Wash.,  plant and a meat packaging facility in Utah. This signaled that Tyson is consolidating its beef division along the western “beef belt” where three plants will remain – Amarillo, Dakota City and another in Kansas. The move acknowledges the restriction and concentration of the U.S. cattle herd and positions the company closer to larger operations, which St. Peters said he understands.

“I believe they (the plants) each average about 6,000 head, so they are about twice the size of the Joslin plant. But they also are facilities where (Tyson) is able to contract-produce cattle, so there is an opportunity to own cattle and manage them all the way through to harvest, versus the Illinois market which was a cash market for them,” the IBA leader explained.

Joslin’s closure leaves most Illinois producers without a major receiver for beef cattle, though a number of “locker” facilities remain. However, many lockers and butcher shops do not have kill floors. For now, only one large-scale beef packer remains – Aurora Packing Co. in North Aurora, which is in Kane County in northeast Illinois.

“We’ve been working with our members since Aug. 13 to understand how we can help them. It’s been a tremendous amount of phone calls to put our members in touch with cattle buyers,” St. Peters said. “Longer-term, we are looking into the possibility and hopes of Tyson selling the Joslin facility in hopes that someone else might operate a plant there, and be profitable in continuing to harvest the very high-quality Illinois beef cattle through that plant.”

While there are concerns for the Illinois beef industry as a whole following the closure of the Tyson plant in Joslin, St. Peters remained optimistic that most IBA producers will continue to feed cattle. “We are having those conversations with producers to understand what we can do for them in this situation,” he said. “To get the plant back into operation possibly under new ownership would certainly create additional demand and hopefully bring back the market here in Illinois.”