By Elizabeth Rembert
A crane looms above a dusty field just outside of North Platte, where trucks loaded with dirt criss-cross the busy site and workers set up a foundation. Two years ago, an old sewer lagoon took up this stretch of land. Cattails and marshy soil made the field a swampy mess.
Today, it’s the future site of Sustainable Beef, a meatpacking plant that Nebraska ranchers and cattle feeders began organizing in 2020.
It took 18 months, 18 public hearings and seven different public agencies for the idea of a rancher-owned plant to get government approval. With paperwork secured, the physical work has begun.
“We’re making great progress and it’s encouraging to see,” Sustainable Beef CEO David Briggs said. “Still, it’s a daunting task and there’s so much work to do before we process our first animal.”
Briggs said he expects the facility to be up and running in 2025. When the plant is fully operational, it will process around 1,500 cattle a day. That’s roughly 1.5% of the nation’s capacity, according to Briggs.
“Our mission was not to just be a local or to take care of one community,” he said. “It was to help with the national security concept, and actually be a player in the overall industry.”
It’s an industry that has become increasingly challenging for Nebraskans in the cattle business, as processing companies like Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef have gotten bigger. Today, four companies control around 85% of the beef market.
That’s left fewer buyers and forced ranchers to take lower prices when they sell their animals to be turned into steaks, even as grocery shoppers pay more for those cuts.
Keeping money in cattle country
Sustainable Beef represents a bid at stopping the flow of money toward corporate bank accounts, instead putting it in local cattlemen’s pockets, like board member and founder Trey Wasserburger.
Wasserburger works alongside his father-in-law Kirk Olson at Olson Farms, a feed yard near Hershey. He looks out over one of the feedlot’s pens, where cattle crowd close to the edges to push their heads through a fence and get to the golden grains in a feed trough.
“These will probably be ready to go here in the next 30 or 40 days,” Wasserburger said. “They'll go to a large packer and they'll be in the beef supply chain in 60 days, probably.”
It takes three years of hard work to even get the cattle to this point, he said. Now they need twice-daily feedings, regular cleaning and constant health checks.
Cassie Lapaseotes – another Sustainable Beef board member and founder – runs a feed yard with her family near Bridgeport. She said it’s sort of like a hotel model.
“Before you go to a hotel, you want clean sheets and everything ready for you to come in,” Lapaseotes said. “When these cattle come into a feed yard, we want their pens to be clean, their water tanks to be clean, the feed to be freshly laid out in front of them.”
Boost from Walmart
Walmart Inc. has stepped up to be among the company’s first customers. The retailer has invested in the project and agreed to buy and distribute the majority of Sustainable Beef’s product.
To Briggs, the partnership is what could set the company apart from other collapsed meatpacking projects.
“This is how a lot of things get in trouble, in my opinion. They have this grand idea. And they're good ideas,” he said. “They got good support from the producer, and they build a plant, but then what do you do with all the beef?”
Even with a boost from the nation’s largest grocery chain by market share, Wasserburger says they’re not trying to compete with the giant packers.
“That’s like comparing the Yankees to my son's T-ball team,” he said. “We don't want to be the Yankees and we're not pretending like we are. This model works for us and our families and so we're going to play ball like we know.”
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