I spent Wednesday morning last week touring the new C & S Beef Packers in Kuna, ID. This a joint project between J.R. Simplot Company, which has a rather large footprint in agribusiness in Idaho, and Caviness Beef Packers, a 50-year-old packing company located in the Panhandle of Texas. This plant has been operating for about 10 months now and is finally getting up to full capacity of 1,800 head per day.
This is a cow beef processing plant and has served this region well. The dairy business has been growing quickly in this region for quite some time and there was a genuine need for a new plant in Idaho. Prior to C&S opening, slaughter cows were being shipped all over the country for processing—from Green Bay, WI, to Tolleson, AZ, and even to a Caviness plant in Booker, TX.
This new plant has added a lot of value to cattle in the region. Rex Hoagland, head of cattle procurement, told me that they are focused on cull cows and bulls now and that the mix between dairy animals and beef animals varies at around 60 percent dairy to 40 percent beef, but they will see more beef cattle in the fall when cattlemen do their fall culling. He said that they plan on processing fed cattle soon, in the second quarter, which is just a couple months away. But it sounded like they had been working with Country Natural Beef to process their program cattle and he said that Simplot is planning on bringing some branded beef products to the market.
C&S also has several branded programs and has been doing custom processing for some smaller boutique-like beef programs such as Heartland Beef, which is tied to the Akaushi breed.
What is nice about this plant is that it is shiny and new. Every major packing plant that I have visited has been 50 years old and retrofitted 20 times. The last plant to be new construction was the White Oak plant in Aberdeen, SD, and I understand they are still operating. Then there was the Brawley Beef plant built by Imperial Valley cattle feeders and that was about 15 years ago. And we understand they are processing once again on a limited basis. But this is a big deal to have two experienced players in the business make this kind of investment in the beef industry.
Over the past two years, the packing industry has been earning record profits and there are many market observers waiting to see the big four packers start to invest in new infrastructure for beef processing. The pork side has seen several new large plants open this past year.
This is without question a state-of-the-art beef plant. Starting with the off-loading area for cattle, it’s all Temple Grandin-designed so they come off the truck or stock trailer smooth and easy. They are cleaned up before they go into the kill box and cleaned up again before they hit the evisceration process and hide removal process. Carcasses go through three lactic acid washes to remove any pathogens. Food safety is paramount for this outfit, as it is for any food processor.
They are trying to be very transparent and a visitor can see most of the evisceration and the breaking process through windows in a long hallway that flanks the production floor.
They are also environmentally conscious. They get all their water from a well and recycle their wastewater in sealed, covered anaerobic lagoons, capturing the methane to operate their boilers. They then recycle that water onto farm fields for irrigation and fertilizer. The plant has a larger solar farm and uses LED lighting and skylights where they can. And, of course, they do all their own rendering and hide processing.
Processing cows isn’t much different than fed cattle. These guys can track a rancher’s cull cows through the system and report yield, grade and how many condemnations there may be. They spend a fair amount of time teaching ranchers about BQA principals to help them earn more from cull cows. Rex noted that one of their big issues is with buckshot in cows and bulls. Some cattlemen find it easier to blast a bull or cow out of the willows, thinking that the shot just bounces off their hide. It doesn’t. We condemn lots of cattle because of buckshot and everybody loses value on those. This is a fantastic operation and I’m sure that the C&S folks would love to show it off to you. They are good for your business. — PETE CROW
