Beef is to 2026 what eggs were to 2025.
Persistent shortages of cattle are leading to substantial increases in prices at the grocery store, losses for beef processors and now a meaningful economic blow to a part of Illinois that already is hurting — Quad Cities.
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Arkansas-based Tyson Foods late last week announced plans to close its sprawling beef processing plant in Joslin, Illinois, just northeast of the Quad Cities. The company gave its mostly unionized workforce of more than 2,500 next to no notice, although it said it would pay them for the 60 days that Illinois requires at minimum in mass layoffs.
The facility has been a major employer in the area for more than 40 years. Mainly serving farms in Illinois and Iowa, the plant could process up to 3,000 head of cattle a day.
Tyson also shuttered a smaller meat processing plant in Utah and is looking to sell a separate facility in Washington state. The company attributed the moves to “one of the most historic cattle shortages the country has ever experienced.” It said the trend isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Tyson said it will consolidate its beef processing at existing plants in Amarillo, Texas; Holcomb, Kansas; and Dakota City, Nebraska.
There’s a temptation in such circumstances to ask, why us? Why is Joslin closing and not Holcomb? Or Dakota City?
Indeed, Tyson has been shrinking its presence in Illinois in recent years. Four years ago, it announced the closure of corporate offices in Chicago and Downers Grove, consolidating those functions at its Springdale, Arkansas, headquarters.
But the rationalization of the beef industry is hitting communities all over the country. The better response is for public officials and others in the community to determine what can be done to help as many of the families devastated by such a shock as possible, both in the short and long term.
Case in point: Just outside Philadelphia, in Souderton, Pennsylvania, Brazilian company JBS, the world’s largest beef processor and also the biggest operating in the U.S., announced plans in June to shutter a meatpacking plant that employed 1,700. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the local business community and the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represented the workers there, got involved, and less than two months later JBS said it would transform the facility into an operation packaging beef for immediate sale to consumers.
The move will preserve 400 jobs, and JBS is investing $30 million into the plant over the coming decade.
So it was good to see Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Illinois huddling Tuesday with Gov. JB Pritzker’s office and state agencies on ways to help the affected families and begin thinking about future uses at the site and addressing the ripple effects that will be felt by Illinois farmers and businesses dependent in no small part on the plant.
“It is critically important to get these stakeholders all working in the same direction to mobilize resources and strategies to try to rebound the industry as quickly as possible,” GOP state Rep. Brad Fritts of Dixon said in a release.
For the Quad Cities, the timing is awful. It’s been one of the worst performing parts of the region economically, according to the most recent annual economic forecast put together by Moody’s Analytics on behalf of the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting & Accountability. As of February, when the report was published, it said of the Quad Cities, “The labor market has deteriorated, with payrolls and household employment falling further, and the labor force decline accelerating.”
Much of the drag on the Quad Cities at the time was coming from the Trump tariffs’ negative effect on agriculture. About the only reassuring thing the report had to say in February was that “payrolls in lower-paying food manufacturing are expected to stay steady over the next year.”
So much for that prediction.
Quad Cities needs help. As nasty as this shock is, it’s an opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to work together productively and demonstrate to Illinoisans that partisanship has no place when so many lose their jobs.
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