Producer Owned Beef Processing Plant to Break Ground in Early 2023 in Amarillo

Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is featuring comments from the new Executive Vice President of Producer Owned Beef, Cassie Fish, talking about the LLC and cooperative for a new beef processing facility in the Texas panhandle.



The 670-million-dollar plant is proposed to be built just east of Amarillo on a 1,000-acre plot. It will have a 3,000 head a day capacity and 1600 workers, all owned by 100 to 150 cattle producers.



On August 10, Governor Abbot announced that 12.232 million dollars from the Texas Enterprise Fund will be awarded to Producer Owned Beef.



“When you think about it, we haven’t built a beef processing plant of this size that can harvest 3,000 head per day since 1992,” Fish said. “So, we can bring the latest building techniques, energy efficiencies, top quality air handlers so we don’t have any odor issues and a really advanced wastewater treatment facility that we are going to clean the water up beyond stream discharge.”



The cattle producers who own the plant come from all over, Fish said, as far as Hawaii and Canada. Regardless of where the cattle producer is from, Fish said they will be required to have the cattle fed in eastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle or in Texas.



“They can live anywhere, but the cattle need to be fed here a minimum of 100 days on feed,” Fish said. “So, this is going to bring some cattle on feed in the state.”



Fish said the majority of the producers live within a couple of hundred miles of where the plant will be.



“What our structure will allow is for the producer to capture that profit on the processing side and keep that money in the region and actually take that profit from the processing plant,” Fish said. “Just being able to capture that additional 100 to 200 dollars per head profit from the packing side- the processing side- and being able to benefit from that plant’s ownership.”



As far as the timeline is concerned, they are hoping to break ground in the first quarter of 2023 and be online buying cattle and processing beef, in the final quarter of 2025.



That will be a challenging time as tight beef supplies will likely be a part of the landscape in 2025, but Fish says they are hopeful to be online selling beef and selling a branded product down the road



“That link between the producers of the product and the consumers is much closer,” Fish said.





Once that regional brand is developed, Fish said they can gain the support of those in the region who enjoy supporting local products.







Thank you to James Hunt, the High Plains correspondent for the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network for providing comments from Cassie Fish.



Click the LISTEN BAR below to hear more from Ron Hays and Cassie Fish on the Producer Owned Beef processing plant coming to Amarillo, Texas.



The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.