1 week Ago By TODD VON KAMPEN [email protected]
There’s too many openings not yet covered by doors to say North Platte’s Sustainable Beef meatpacking plant is “fully enclosed.” But the last precast concrete panels for the frame of the sprawling 556,000-square-foot plant were put in place Friday, leaders of the $325 million-plus project and main contractor Schmeeckle Bros. Construction Co.
said Monday. Natalie Pochop, Sustainable Beef project manager for Schmeeckle Bros. Construction Co.
, shows reporters Monday where beef carcasses will enter a hot-water bath in the "hide-off room" of the North Platte meatpacking plant. "The whole idea is microbial kill" before the carcasses are inspected, she said. That milestone opened the two-year-old construction process’s six-month home stretch.
Sustainable Beef has scheduled its ribbon-cutting ceremony for 2 p.m. on March 24, 2025, CEO David Briggs told local and regional newspaper, TV and radio reporters.
A gradual production startup will follow in April, he said, featuring the first 100 of an eventual 800-plus employees whom Sustainable Beef will begin hiring as 2025 begins. “It will probably take us about eight to 10 months to get to capacity” in total payroll and the 1,500 head of cattle to be processed per day, Briggs said. “It’s a heavy lift to get the plant up and running and then to just get the employees and the whole floor working — add employees, add cattle, add employees, add cattle.
” Briggs, Schmeeckle project manager Natalie Pochop and newly hired Sustainable Beef General Manager Ryan Wagnon showed off progress on the plant’s construction and equipment installation. Briggs led a similar press tour nearly a year ago on Sept. 26, 2023.
Sustainable Beef General Manager Ryan Wagnon (left) listens Monday as CEO David Briggs answers reporters' questions about construction progress at the North Platte meatpacking plant. Wagnon, who spent 22 years with the JBS Foods plant at Cactus, Texas, was hired in March. Semitrailer trucks began dumping some 50,000 loads of fill dirt into a retired city wastewater lagoon in November 2022, a month after North Platte’s Oct.
4 kickoff celebration including state leaders and Nebraska members of Congress. Sustainable Beef organizers first met with key community leaders on Aug. 19, 2020, North Platte Area Chamber & Development Corp.
President and Gary Person reminded reporters. The project was publicly unveiled March 18, 2021, and City Council members unanimously granted $21.5 million in tax increment financing assistance that Dec.
7. The final financing piece was announced on Aug. 31, 2022, when Walmart committed to take a majority of the plant’s 1,500-head-per-day beef capacity in exchange for a minority stake in the rancher-driven company.
Briggs said Sustainable Beef needed four “Cs” to succeed: a host city, cattle, capital and beef consumers. They’ve secured the first three and are confident in the last, he said. “I really thought the first “C” would be the hardest,” Briggs said.
But from their first meeting, North Platte leaders “said ‘we want this plant.’” About 75% of Sustainable Beef's meatpacking equipment has been installed ahead of the North Platte plant's expected production startup in April 2025, company and construction managers said Monday. This equipment sits in the "hide-on" room, where processing of slaughtered cattle begins with removal of their hides, heads, tongues and tails.
Person said independent businesses that supply supporting packing-plant services have visited North Platte. One handles cattle hides, and another would bring “pretty substantial employment” for cleaning the beef plant. But he said Sustainable Beef “is having an enormous economic impact already” through the construction process, retail sales, hotel-motel income and 17 housing projects at various stages of development.
“We couldn’t be more pleased as a community that they chose North Platte,” Person said. North Platte’s support of the project helped persuade Wagnon to abandon plans to retire from the meatpacking industry, the six-month Sustainable Beef general manager said during the tour. Cattle being processed in North Platte's Sustainable Beef meatpacking plant will be suspended from the 19-foot-high conveyors shown above.
Line workers will be able to easily reach them because they're typically 15 to 16 feet long and will be suspended from a 3-foot-long chain, said Natalie Pochop, project manager for Schmeeckle Bros. Construction Co. of Fort Morgan, Colorado.
The western Oklahoma native had spent 22 years with JBS Foods’ meatpacking plant in Cactus, Texas, in that state’s Panhandle about 60 miles north of Amarillo. He was assistant general manager when he stepped down. “I wanted to go back home and ranch with my family,” Wagnon said.
But when invited to North Platte to check out the Sustainable Beef job, “it was exciting to understand how bad North Platte wanted this.” Briggs, who plans to retire from Alliance-based Westco Cooperative Co. and move to North Platte when the plant opens, said about seven management leaders have been hired alongside Wagnon.
They’re working out of a rented building on North Dewey Street while the plant is being finished. He repeated his belief that most of Sustainable Beef’s eventual line workers already live in Nebraska. They’ll be attracted by the plant’s single-shift, “family-friendly” working model and a starting wage of $50,000 a year, he said.
“Between the people who already live within 60 miles of North Platte and elsewhere in Nebraska, that’s where most of the employees will come from,” Briggs said. “We believe there are 16,000 people in Nebraska ready to do this work,” including workers at other packing plants, he added. “We really don’t need that many of them.
” A construction worker proceeds Monday with equipment installation in North Platte's Sustainable Beef meatpacking plant. Company leaders plan a March 24, 2025, ribbon-cutting ceremony and a production startup in April. With Friday’s completion of concrete framing, the walls are complete for the main cattle processing building and an adjoining rendering plant on its southwest, project manager Pochop said.
Concrete walls now will start rising for the 960-head holding pens just west of the main plant, she said. Work crews are about halfway through paving about 23 acres’ worth of concrete parking lots and internal roads. Schmeeckle Bros.
President Wayne Schmeeckle said the beef plant’s outdoor work should be done by winter. The plant’s rooftop HVAC units “will be ready to pour heated air into the building all winter long,” he said. Boxed beef will wait in this room in North Platte's Sustainable Beef meatpacking plant before being shipped to wholesalers ranging from retail giant Walmart — which will take the majority of the plant's 1,500 head of cattle processed daily — to local grocery stores with meat counters.
The racks will have room for 1,700 pallets holding 45,000 to 50,000 boxes of beef, Schmeeckle Bros. Construction Co. project manager Natalie Pochop said.
Chief Construction of Grand Island is the Fort Morgan, Colorado firm's main subcontractor for Sustainable Beef’s office spaces and employee facilities. Snell Services Inc. is the main HVAC subcontractor, with Midwest Masonry Inc.
doing the concrete work, Pochop said. About 75% of the plant’s processing equipment has been installed, she said. That includes the rendering plant’s odor control system, the overall plant’s three one-ton boilers and a 360,000-gallon holding tank to ensure a constant supply of 160- to 180-degree water.
Without that supply, “the plant does not run,” Pochop said. The plant has redundant systems to guard against unplanned shutdowns. The apparatus connected to Sustainable Beef's beef rendering plant contains the state-of-the-art odor control equipment intended to ensure that unwanted odors don't escape into the air and float into North Platte, the plant's host city.
Pochop and Wagnon said it’s the high-heat process that yields tallow and bone and blood meal — and not the main packing operations from slaughter to packaging — that historically produces packing plants’ unpopular odors. Sustainable Beef leaders have promised they would use state-of-the-art air scrubbers to conquer those odors. Four city leaders tested that promise in November 2021 in Kuna, Idaho, where the CS Beef Packers plant uses the odor control technology they had in mind.
Former Telegraph reporter Susan Szuch, who accompanied the party to Idaho, reported “an acrid, slightly sweet smell” about half a mile from the Kuna plant that dissipated within another mile downwind and upwind. The concrete floor and poles mark the location of Sustainable Beef's cattle-holding pens on the east side of the 556,000-square-foot meatpacking plant under construction in North Platte. The 960-head structure will soon start taking shape with Friday's completion of the main plant's precast concrete walls, company and construction leaders told reporters Monday.
On Monday, while standing just outside the rendering plant, Pochop told reporters that people in that spot once operations start won’t notice odors there. Inside, “it’ll smell like cooked fat, because that’s what we’re doing.” Wagnon said he’s confident North Platte residents will be satisfied.
“I’ve never seen a scrubbing system like that on any facility,” he said. “Nobody’s going to smell anything.” Get local news delivered to your inbox! Special projects reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
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