Beef Market Update – RealAgriculture
Aug 14, 2026 · 9 min · 6 segments
What a week. For this episode of the Beef Market Update, Shaun Haney and Anne Wasko of the Gateway Livestock Exchange dive into major shifts across the North American beef sector, starting with…
Shaun HaneyHost
They are changing one plant more into a packaging plant, and also the Pasco facility in Pasco, Washington, about 2,000 head a day, they're intending to sell that.
No indication if they have a buyer, or if they don't find a buyer, does the plant just get closed? But this does impact cattle trade in not only the PNW, but also Western Canada as well.
Yeah, and I don't know if you mentioned on the Tyson deal that they're also talking
And we had news from Tyson, you know, late last year, they closed the plant in Lexington early this year.
and the JBS news now interesting that you know that was going to be the Pennsylvania plant was going to be a complete shutdown so that's interesting that we're hearing that moving to case ready but slaughter stopping and we still got Cargill in the news we talked about two weeks ago on the Fort Morgan plant still labor issues and talking about you know voting again on on the contract there so Bottom line is all this packing plant news is certainly in response to the smaller supply of cattle.
What it means bottom line for producers is loss of leverage as we take away slaughter capacity, even though numbers are tight right now.
and the negative margins that go with that from a packing plant perspective, it does mean that now that capacity isn't there, that leverage isn't there.
And that was one of the strong points that brought us through, you know, late 25 and all of so far in 26 in terms of the fantastic pricing we saw and the producer leverage, you know, the stick, as I call it, was in the producer's hand.
Yeah, and according to Sterling Marketing, currently packers are losing about $200 a head.
When you're in that – I don't care if you're killing $2,000 or $5,000 a day, that's a lot of money going out.
And so you're running a business, you're going to obviously do something to change that storyline in terms of your business.
What do they do when they're in losses for a long period of time? You bring the price of feeder cattle down.
They are changing one plant more into a packaging plant, and also the Pasco facility in Pasco, Washington, about 2,000 head a day, they're intending to sell that.
No indication if they have a buyer, or if they don't find a buyer, does the plant just get closed? But this does impact cattle trade in not only the PNW, but also Western Canada as well.
Yeah, and I don't know if you mentioned on the Tyson deal that they're also talking
And we had news from Tyson, you know, late last year, they closed the plant in Lexington early this year.
and the JBS news now interesting that you know that was going to be the Pennsylvania plant was going to be a complete shutdown so that's interesting that we're hearing that moving to case ready but slaughter stopping and we still got Cargill in the news we talked about two weeks ago on the Fort Morgan plant still labor issues and talking about you know voting again on on the contract there so Bottom line is all this packing plant news is certainly in response to the smaller supply of cattle.
What it means bottom line for producers is loss of leverage as we take away slaughter capacity, even though numbers are tight right now.
and the negative margins that go with that from a packing plant perspective, it does mean that now that capacity isn't there, that leverage isn't there.
And that was one of the strong points that brought us through, you know, late 25 and all of so far in 26 in terms of the fantastic pricing we saw and the producer leverage, you know, the stick, as I call it, was in the producer's hand.
Yeah, and according to Sterling Marketing, currently packers are losing about $200 a head.
When you're in that – I don't care if you're killing $2,000 or $5,000 a day, that's a lot of money going out.
And so you're running a business, you're going to obviously do something to change that storyline in terms of your business.
What do they do when they're in losses for a long period of time? You bring the price of feeder cattle down.
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