While labor and the Big Four management wrangled, innovations were stalking both groups. In 1961, a new operation, Iowa Beef Packers (soon known as IBP) emerged, forty-five miles to the east and north of Omaha, in Denison, Iowa. Its founders set out to completely rethink meatpacking.
IBP located in Dennison to be close to the production of both corn and cattle. Traditional packing houses were multi-story buildings in which livestock were driven up a long ramp to the top floor. They would also slaughter different species in the same building, requiring different departments. They then used gravity to move the carcass from killing room to chiller and then into a railcar.
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society |
Modern packing houses used more
humane methods to slaughter beef
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society |
Iowa Beef Packers, as its name suggests, slaughtered only beef, and its facility was all on the ground level and completely refrigerated. By refrigerating from the beginning, they were able to prevent shrinkage due to dehydration. They also invested heavily in automation and created a true disassembly line where each person had one specific task in the butchering process.
With their line processing of beef, they dramatically reduced the skill level that a meat processor needed, opening up the potential pool of workers. In Dennison, they found an eager labor force drawn largely from people with experience in agriculture. Importantly, this labor force was not organized into a union. A non-unionized, lower-skilled workforce meant the company could pay lower wages, and the automated design meant higher employee output, giving IBP a substantial market advantage.
They also economized by going directly to the rancher or farmer to buy cattle, thus eliminating the stockyards from the transactions. And with large trucks, they transported their cattle straight from the feedlot to the processing plant, further increasing efficiency.
Click the Magnifying Glass icon or the picture for a closer look.
 
Trucks delivering cattle to a meatpacking plant
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society |
IBP revolutionized the industry by developing boxed beef. Transporting carcasses to butchers was grossly inefficient. It meant that the slaughterhouse shipped a lot of waste material, and carcasses did not fit efficiently into the rectangular spaces of refrigerated trucks and rail cars. By cutting the carcasses into smaller pieces that fit nicely into boxes, they were able to pack substantially more beef into a truck, dramatically reducing the cost-per-pound paid for transportation. And because they were doing more of the processing at their plant, the beef required less skilled labor at the meat counter.
In 1967, IBP opened a new, highly automated and immense plant at Dakota City, Nebraska, a small town just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, another major meat-producing city. This became their flagship plant and headquarters.
IBP’s innovations seriously threatened traditional meatpacking jobs, and national unions knew that. Soon, the Dakota City plant became the location of dramatic, sometimes violent, strikes.
Empty Union stockyards, Omaha in the 1990s
Source: NET Television |
By 1973, the bustling stockyards and packing plants of twenty years earlier were all but gone. Nebraska was still a beef state, but the way beef was fed, slaughtered, and sold had completely changed in just a quarter of a century.
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The Meatpacking Revolution
Beef State
