When Tyson Foods announced it would close a beef processing facility in Lexington, Nebraska, and scale back to one shift at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, the company said the move was necessary to “right size” its beef business.
In total, the closure and cutbacks will eliminate about 7 percent to 9 percent of total beef processing capacity nationwide.
But David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M university, doesn’t anticipate that it will have large impacts on the prices producers get for their cattle or how much consumers pay for beef at the grocery store.
“Typically, when a plant closes, what we expect is lower cattle prices and higher beef prices, because we’ve lost this capacity,” he said. “But at the same time, we’ve got so much excess capacity already that that may not happen. It’s not like the closing has created a constraint on packing.”
The closure and cutbacks come amid significant economic issues for meatpackers. In 2025, the U.S. recorded its smallest beef cattle herd in more than 70 years, and meatpackers are losing money as they operate well below capacity.
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When Tyson Foods announced it would close a beef processing facility in Lexington, Nebraska, and scale back to one shift at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, the company said the move was necessary to “right size” its beef business.
In total, the closure and cutbacks will eliminate about 7 percent to 9 percent of total beef processing capacity nationwide.
But David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M university, doesn’t anticipate that it will have large impacts on the prices producers get for their cattle or how much consumers pay for beef at the grocery store.
“Typically, when a plant closes, what we expect is lower cattle prices and higher beef prices, because we’ve lost this capacity,” he said. “But at the same time, we’ve got so much excess capacity already that that may not happen. It’s not like the closing has created a constraint on packing.”
The closure and cutbacks come amid significant economic issues for meatpackers. In 2025, the U.S. recorded its smallest beef cattle herd in more than 70 years, and meatpackers are losing money as they operate well below capacity.