Meatpacking: From the Stockyards to the Kill Floor

For most of the twentieth century, if you ate a hamburger in the United States, the odds were good that the steer it came from passed through Omaha. The South Omaha stockyards, opened in eighteen eighty-four, became one of the largest livestock markets in the world. At their peak, they handled millions of animals a year. The smell carried for miles on the south wind. People who grew up in South Omaha called it the smell of money.

The big packers came to Omaha because the Union Pacific had arrived first. You could ship cattle from ranches in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Sandhills, slaughter them at the railhead, and ship dressed beef east in refrigerated cars. The efficiency was enormous compared to driving live cattle all the way to Chicago. Armour, Swift, and Cudahy all built plants in the stockyards district. The neighborhood around them filled with workers from Poland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Mexico.

The industry restructured in the nineteen seventies and eighties. Iowa Beef Processors, later known as IBP and eventually acquired by Tyson Foods, pioneered a model that moved the slaughter out of cities and into the small towns near the cattle. Box beef, already cut and vacuum-sealed, replaced carcass beef on refrigerated trucks. The Omaha yards shrank and eventually closed as a commodity market in nineteen ninety-nine.

The plants followed the cattle to rural Nebraska. Lexington, Dakota City, and Schuyler became the new centers. Nebraska remains one of the nation's leading beef processing states. The industry simply looks different. Instead of a sprawling urban complex you can smell from downtown, there are large, low-profile facilities on the outskirts of small towns, processing cattle at a scale the nineteenth-century packers could not have imagined.