PASCO – High corn prices and not enough processing plants have produced an oversupply of cattle, causing feedlot headaches for Pacific Northwest beef producers.
When animals are fed corn in feedlots for even a few extra days, it can cost ranchers thousands of dollars. Then beef processors dock producers if their animals are even a few pounds too fat.
Cattle can gain three to five pounds a day in a feedlot and only bring about $20 a head in total profit, so they have to be sold quickly when they are ready.
“The losses are just huge,” said Rod Van de Graaf, co-owner of a large feedlot in Sunnyside. “We are just trying to hold on.”
Van de Graaf said he feeds about 240 tons of corn a day, and he’s got hundreds of cattle milling around that should already have been shipped to market.
Don Beus, owner of a Pasco-area feedlot and cow-calf operation, said he’s been trying to watch his cattle so they don’t gain too much weight as he waits to sell them.
The closure of a Tyson Foods Co. processing plant near Boise, Idaho, is forcing ranchers in Idaho and Oregon to ship their cattle to a Pasco plant, ranchers said.
“They (Tyson) are putting you off for three to four weeks when you have cattle ready,” Beus said.
The problem was compounded when Tyson’s Pasco beef plant, which typically kills about 2,000 head of cattle a day, was shut down for four days after a fire this month.
Lloyd Knight, executive vice president of the Idaho Cattle Association, said many growers have been paying as much as $5 a head to ship their cattle to Pasco.
Some Idaho growers are even shipping cattle as far as Nebraska and Utah for slaughter, he said.
Complicating the regional problem: Alberta, Canada, beef processing plant employees are among hundreds who have been drawn from their industries to work in the booming oil and natural gas fields.
Arno Doerksen, chairman of the Canada Beef Export Federation, said a Tyson plant in Brooks, Alberta, dramatically expanded capacity a few years ago, but the worker shortage means the plant is running short of capacity.
Tyson officials deny any link between labor shortages in Alberta and more cattle being shipped to the Pasco plant, but did acknowledge there appears to be an oversupply of cattle in the region.
“Our Pasco plant has not been taking as many Canadian cattle in recent weeks in an effort to help handle the supply of local cattle,” Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
