A fire at the JBS processing facility in Grand Island, Nebraska, halted beef packing production on Monday. The Grand Island Fire Department explained via Twitter that the fire was burning the roof of the facility?s rendering section. The facility?s Facebook page contained a post stating, ?Fabrication and slaughter A and B shift will not be working? Monday.
The JBS Grand Island facility is a two-shift, beef-processing plant employing more than 3,600 people. It has a daily processing capacity of 6,000 head and slaughters roughly five percent of U.S. cattle. This past June, JBS announced a $130 million facility improvement effort to increase production capacity at both the Grand Island facility and another in Omaha.
The impacts of the fire and how it was started are unclear. JBS said they expected to reopen the facility Tuesday (today). In 2019, a fire at Tyson?s Holcomb, Kansas facility took out 30,000 head of weekly processing capacity, with immediate and still lingering market disruption issues.
