The Cattle Capital: Feedlots and a Quarter of America's Beef

If you have eaten a hamburger in the United States in the past fifty years, there is roughly a one in four chance that the animal it came from passed through the Texas Panhandle. About one quarter of the United States beef supply is processed in the Amarillo area. This is not a historical footnote, it is current industrial reality.

Amarillo's cattle economy has three phases. The first began in the eighteen eighties, when the Fort Worth and Denver Railway made the city one of the world's busiest cattle-shipping points. Longhorns driven up from South Texas moved through Amarillo stockyards to markets in Kansas City and Chicago. The city grew on cattle commission fees and the supply businesses that served the ranches.

The second phase began after the Second World War, when grain sorghum irrigation farming expanded across the Panhandle and feedlot operations discovered that the flat, dry, open land around Amarillo was nearly perfect for concentrated cattle finishing. Feed grain was local. The climate was dry enough to minimize disease. Land was cheap. In May of nineteen sixty-seven, ten major cattle feeders met in Amarillo to coordinate their operations and formed the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, which became one of the most powerful commodity organizations in American agriculture.

The third phase was industrial processing. IBP, which stood for Iowa Beef Processors and later became Tyson Foods, built one of its flagship beef-processing plants near Amarillo. In nineteen ninety-one IBP added one of the nation's largest tanneries adjacent to the processing facility. By the late nineteen eighties, IBP and a small number of comparable firms controlled eighty percent of American beef slaughter.

The Panhandle feedlot economy created enormous wealth and employment. It also created a landscape of industrial scale that has no analog elsewhere in the American West.