Tyson Foods is preparing to idle two of its biggest beef plants and shed thousands of jobs, a stark response to a cattle shortage that has pushed the U.S. herd to its lowest level in nearly 75 years. The company’s decision to eliminate roughly 4,900 positions across Nebraska and Texas crystallizes how a long, grinding squeeze in livestock supplies is now reshaping the country’s meatpacking map and the communities that depend on it.
What might look like a corporate restructuring on paper is, in reality, the collision of drought, high feed costs, and relentless consumer demand with the limits of the nation’s cattle supply. As plants in Lexington and Amarillo wind down, the fallout will ripple from ranchers and feedlots to grocery meat cases, testing how resilient the beef supply chain really is when the raw material itself is in historic shortfall.
The historic cattle crunch behind Tyson’s move
I see Tyson’s closures as the clearest signal yet that the U.S. beef sector has hit a structural breaking point, not just a cyclical dip. The U.S. cattle herd has fallen to its lowest level in nearly 75 years, a decline driven by years of drought, high input costs, and ranchers culling animals faster than they can rebuild. That contraction has left packers like Tyson competing for a shrinking pool of animals, eroding margins at plants that were designed for much larger volumes.
When a processor built for peak throughput suddenly faces a smaller herd, the math turns unforgiving. Tyson’s beef business has been squeezed by dwindling cattle supplies and sustained consumer demand that keeps pressure on prices even as plants run below capacity. Reporting on the company’s decision to shut a major facility in Nebraska describes how Tyson Foods weighed those realities and concluded that some of its largest operations no longer made economic sense. In that context, the closures are less a surprise than an overdue acknowledgment that the industry has been processing more steel and concrete than cattle for some time.
Lexington, Nebraska: a 3,200-job shock to a beef town
The most dramatic blow lands in Lexington, Nebraska, where Tyson is closing a long‑running beef plant that has anchored the local economy for decades. The facility employs 3,200 people, a staggering number in a small city that has grown around the rhythms of shifts, paychecks, and cattle trucks. Tyson Foods said in late Nov that it would wind down operations at the site, citing the mismatch between its processing capacity and the available cattle supply…