Nov 26, 2025
By Azzeddine Azzam
What Happened in 2020
Spring 2020 brought chaos to America's beef industry. As COVID-19 swept through large meatpacking plants, many were forced to shut down or drastically cut operations. In just five weeks between April and mid-June, the nation's cattle slaughter dropped by 35%. Ranchers found themselves with market-ready cattle and nowhere to send them.
The federal response was swift and substantial. USDA committed over $4 billion to strengthen the food supply chain, including $500 million in grants. The strategy seemed obvious: invest in small, local processors to reduce dependence on the large plants that had proven so vulnerable.
But was that the right approach?
A Closer Look at What Actually Worked
New research published in the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics[1] examined which states' beef packing sectors actually proved most resilient during the pandemic. Researchers Sunil P. Dhoubhadel and Binod Khanal from Prairie View A&M University, along with Azzeddine Azzam from the University of Nebraska, analyzed cattle slaughter data from 35 states throughout 2020. Rather than just measuring how far slaughter numbers dropped, they tracked how quickly states recovered and how complete that recovery was.
Their findings challenge the conventional wisdom about plant size and resilience.
The Three Categories: What the Data Revealed
Large Plants (over 1 million head per year): These giants were hit hardest. States heavily dependent on these facilities—like Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas—showed the least resilience. When these plants went down, they created severe bottlenecks that rippled through the entire supply chain.
Small Plants (under 100,000 head per year): These facilities performed better than expected. Many maintained operations throughout the pandemic, and none closed entirely. However, they weren't the most resilient option.
Medium-Sized Plants (100,000 to about 1 million head per year): Here's the surprise. States with more medium-sized plants demonstrated the strongest resilience. They bounced back faster and more completely than states relying on either large or small facilities. Across multiple measures of recovery, medium plants consistently outperformed both extremes.
Why This Matters for Your Operation
If you're a cattle producer, processing capacity directly affects your bottom line. The 2020 disruptions left many producers scrambling, with some forced to delay marketing cattle or accept steep price discounts. A more resilient processing sector means more stable markets and fewer surprises.
Medium-sized plants appear to offer the sweet spot: large enough to operate efficiently, but not so large that a single facility's closure cripples an entire region's processing capacity.
What Needs to Happen Next
For medium-sized plants to fulfill their potential as stabilizers of the beef supply chain, several obstacles must be addressed:
Competition and Efficiency: These plants need modern technology—automation and AI-driven systems—to remain competitive under normal market conditions. Simply building more plants using outdated methods won't work.
Cattle Supply: Large packers have long-standing contracts with major feedlots, making it difficult for medium plants to secure consistent cattle supplies. USDA could help by creating incentives for feedlot-medium plant partnerships that benefit both parties.
Location Strategy: Medium plants may be most viable in regions with smaller, more dispersed feedyards—like the Southeast—rather than trying to compete head-to-head in heavily concentrated cattle-feeding regions. They might also succeed by targeting specialty markets that don't require massive scale.
A Better Path Forward?
This research suggests the current policy focus on small plants, while well-intentioned, may miss the mark. The evidence points toward medium-sized facilities as the backbone of a truly resilient beef processing system.
For policymakers, this means rethinking grant programs and support mechanisms to include medium-scale operations. For producers, it means advocating for policies that build up this middle tier of processing capacity.
The pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in the beef supply chain. The question now is whether we'll learn the right lessons and build the resilience we actually need—not just the resilience we assumed we needed.
For a full non-technical summary of the research article, you can click on the link below to tune in to the AI podcast by Google Notebook LM.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-DaTr_TPD7ADmsL9ZMrP0wzmQ45wfxRR/view?usp=sharing
Azzeddine Azzam
Roy Frederick Professor of Agricultural Economics
College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
aazzam1@nebraska.edu
Sunil P. Dhoubhadel
Associate Professor of Agribusiness
College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
Prairie View A&M University
spdhoubhadel@pvamu.edu
Binod Khanal
Research Assistant Professor
College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
Prairie View A&M University
khanal@pvamu.edu
Acknowledgment: The text of this article was refined with the assistance of the AI tool Claude to help make this research summary clear and accessible to farmers, ranchers, commodity groups, and policymakers.
[1] Dhoubhadel, Sunil P., Azzeddine M. Azzam, and Binod Khanal. "Measuring and Explaining State-Level Heterogeneity in Beef Packing Resilience During the COVID-19 Disruption." Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics (2025): 1-23.