He calls it the first of rural America’s food-processing boomtowns - quickly transforming from what he described as a white agrarian community in 1980 to one of the most diverse places in Kansas. Stull has tracked the beef industry’s impact on Garden City for more than three decades as a University of Kansas professor and author. ”And the way to add value to an animal is to slaughter it.” In this photo from 1990, two meatpacking workers trim beef carcasses inside the plant near Garden City. “The way to add value to grain is to put it in an animal,” Don Stull said.
#Garden of fear game plus#
Those wells plus new center pivot irrigation technology allowed farmers to grow more water-intensive crops in places that get hardly any rain. But in the 1960s, packers began to build plants in the countryside - away from big city unions and closer to cattle and the grain that fattens them through the last few months of their lives.Īround that same time, the number of water wells drilled into the Ogallala Aquifer underneath this region skyrocketed. Meatpacking plants historically operated in urban centers, such as Kansas City and Chicago. So what made Garden City and Lamar the two finalists to win this sprawling slaughterhouse in the first place?Īs often happens on the High Plains, it comes back to water. The plant can be seen in the distance over his right shoulder. Larry Jones’ farm is so close to the Tyson Foods’ meatpacking plant that beef trucks often take wrong turns into his fields. Inside, more than 3,000 workers - most of them immigrants and refugees - butcher 6,000 head of cattle every day. Next door to Jones’ milo field sits the giant, boxy structure that resuscitated Garden City: Tyson Foods’ Finney County beef plant. “If you’d been here 20 years ago and looked at it,” he said, “you wouldn’t recognize the town.” Larry Jones has watched the transformation of western Kansas’ largest city from his farm and cattle company that sits just outside of town. The number of people living in Prowers County - home to Lamar - has slowly slipped under 12,000. And through the 1960s, they were roughly the same size.īut the population of Finney County - home to Garden City - has doubled since 1970. Garden City and Lamar share the same river, the same highway, the same railroad line and the same Dust Bowl past. That’s because the town that Garden City beat out to win the meatpacking plant was Lamar. What’s more, the diverging trajectories of Garden City and Lamar over the past 40-some years offer a glimpse at the knife’s edge between prosperity and decline in rural America. And the city’s decision to open its doors to the thousands of immigrant and refugee workers who would accompany the plant has - at least so far - helped it escape the fate of the many surrounding towns that still see an unending exodus. The plant’s arrival marked a milestone for Garden City, making it the epicenter of the High Plains beef industry. A boomtown in a region that has lost residents for generations. Almost overnight, it became the fastest growing part of Kansas. But in 1980, the world’s largest meatpacking plant opened on the outskirts of Garden City. Just a few decades ago, the two outposts were basically Kansas and Colorado versions of each other. Garden City’s Burger King (right) stands in the middle of the city’s growing retail district, next to the region’s only Target store. “You’re sitting there going, ‘What’s next, a locust invasion?’” Lamar (left) has seen some of its businesses, like this Burger King, close over the past two decades.
“That was pretty much the perfect storm,” Baldwin said. Then the factory that used to be the town’s largest employer - until it abruptly shut down 15 years ago. Within minutes, he drives past the airport that lost its last commercial flight in the early 2000s. Plywood boards cover the drive-thru window. “Behold: the former Burger King,” Baldwin said, lifting his hand from the steering wheel. One hundred miles west, Russ Baldwin makes a left turn off Main Street into an empty parking lot in Lamar, Colorado. The Home Depot stands next to the Dick’s Sporting Goods, which shares a parking lot with the Old Navy that just opened this summer.Īcross the street, one of the town’s two Burger Kings serves up Whoppers in the shadow of the only Target store for a three-hour drive in any direction.
#Garden of fear game drivers#
( Kansas News Service) - Drivers approaching this cattle city on Kansas 156 watch as the scenery changes from a patchwork of southwest Kansas crop fields, pastures and feedlots to a collage of suburban sprawl. Four decades ago, a town in Kansas and a town in Colorado competed to become home to a giant meatpacking plant that, at the time, was the largest of its kind in the world.
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