This is the third in the Honest Cattle research series built from the Montana Department of Livestock 2023 FOIA brand-inspection release. Prepared with the assistance of AI.
The first paper in this series — Where Montana’s Cattle Went in 2023 — established that 60.8% of Montana’s inspected cattle left the state in 2023, and where they went. The second paper — Where Montana’s Cattle Land — profiled the five states that received 62% of those out-of-state shipments. This paper attempts a harder question: once we know which state a Montana steer is headed to, can we say which captivity tier of feedyard he ends up in? The short answer is: not from public records. What we can do is map the yards in some states and estimate where Montana cattle would land if they were spread across those yards by size.
The framework comes from a sister paper at Farm Animal Transparency (FAT): Captive in Practice. It defines four captivity tiers for any commercial feedyard:
- Ownership-captive — owned by a packer or by a large corporate feeding chain (Five Rivers Cattle Feeding, Cactus Feeders, Friona Industries, Adams Land & Cattle, Simplot, Pinal, Bar-G, Champion). Corporate ownership is not the same thing as packer ownership. Five Rivers, for example, was owned by JBS until JBS sold it to Pinnacle Asset Management in 2018; the sale came with a long-term agreement for Five Rivers to supply cattle to JBS plants. That is a documented marketing commitment, not packer ownership. Five Rivers stays in this tier because it is a large corporate chain.
- Geographic-captive — exactly one Big Four / key independent plant within 50 miles (straight-line). This is a measure of distance to plants: freight makes selling to a farther plant more expensive, but it does not prove the yard cannot or does not sell elsewhere.
- Remote — no plant within 50 miles. The yard bears a freight penalty against every packer regardless of choice.
- Multi-plant choice — two or more plants within 50 miles. The yard can credibly cross-shop in any given week.
Tiers are mutually exclusive; ownership wins over geography. Contract-based captivity (formula and forward contracts via grid pricing) is a fifth dimension that is structurally captive but mostly invisible to public data because most contract relationships are private. Five Rivers’ supply agreement with JBS, announced with the 2018 sale, is a rare public example. Where we don’t know a yard’s contracts, we treat them as unknown.
The methodology and its honest limit
To run a flow-weighted captivity analysis on Montana cattle, three data layers have to line up:
- Montana origin → destination state flow. We have this from the 2023 FOIA release: 990,376 head moved from Montana to its 14 largest out-of-state destinations in 2023 (1,012,449 head left the state in all). These are head brand-inspected on the way out, by the destination state recorded at inspection — not a record of which yard the cattle went to.
- Destination state’s commercial feedyard population, with capacity and geographic location for each yard. This is where the data gets thin. Comprehensive public yard directories exist for Kansas and Nebraska. We did not find equivalent public directories for the eleven other states and one province among those 14 destinations.
- For each yard, ownership classification (corporate name match) and geographic classification (count of Big Four / key independent plants within 50 miles).
Where all three layers exist (NE, KS), we can map the yards by tier and allocate Montana’s inflow across them in proportion to yard capacity. That is a model of where the cattle would go if they spread out by yard size — not a trace of where they actually went, because no public record links a Montana load to a particular yard. Where only ownership data exists (TX, CO, ID, AZ — corporate yards documented on company websites), we can only sketch illustrative what-if figures for the named corporate yards. Where neither exists (SD, WA, IA, WY, MN, ND, AB), we did not find public data that would let us say what tier of yard inbound Montana cattle land in.
That is itself the headline finding of this paper. So before the numerical analysis, the result that matters most:
Of the 990,376 head Montana shipped to its 14 largest out-of-state destinations in 2023, about 61% — 603,267 head — went to destination states where we found no comprehensive public feedyard directory, so how many of those cattle land in captive yards cannot be measured from public data. Public directories let us map the yards — though not trace the cattle into them — for only about 25% of the flow, the 245,626 head that went to Nebraska and Kansas, plus the big corporate yards for another 14%, the 141,483 head that went to Colorado, Idaho and Texas. That is about 39% in all. Even there, no public record shows which yard a Montana load went to. This is the transparency gap that any honest accounting of Montana cattle marketing has to start by acknowledging.
Where data is good: Nebraska, the largest market
Nebraska took 212,356 head from Montana in 2023 — the single largest destination state. The Nebraska Cattle Feeders Directory (120 yards) plus FAT’s manually-added corporate yards give us 122 mapped yards covering ~1.48M head of capacity (equal to about 55% of the state’s 2.67M head on feed on December 1, 2025, per USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed — only a rough gauge of coverage, since yard capacity and cattle on feed are different measures). Allocating Montana’s Nebraska flow across those yards in proportion to their capacity gives this captivity tier distribution:
| Tier | Share of NE capacity | Allocated MT head |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership-captive (Adams Land & Cattle, Gibraltar Feedyard) | 11.5% | 24,354 |
| Geographic-captive (1 plant within 50 mi) | 19.3% | 41,000 |
| Remote (0 plants within 50 mi) | 52.7% | 111,933 |
| Multi-plant choice (2+ plants within 50 mi) | 16.5% | 35,069 |
| Captive subtotal (ownership + geographic) | 30.8% | 65,354 |
Within Nebraska, then, if Montana cattle are spread across yards in proportion to yard size, roughly one in three would land in a yard that is either owned by a large corporate feeding chain or has only one packing plant within 50 miles. About one in six would land in a yard with credible cross-shop ability. The largest single group — 53% of capacity, 112,000 Montana head under this allocation — sits in the remote tier, far enough from any plant that freight costs weaken the yard’s bargaining position regardless of which packer it sells to.
This is, importantly, a capacity-weighted allocation — a model, not a trace. We don’t know which specific Nebraska yard each Montana load went to. The assumption is that Montana inbound is distributed across Nebraska yards roughly in proportion to yard capacity. That is a reasonable first approximation given that buyer activity tends to scale with operational size, but it is an assumption: if Montana cattle in fact go mostly to smaller independent yards, or mostly to the big corporate ones, the real shares could be quite different. Pinning them down would require yard-level destination data that is not in the FOIA release and that we did not find in any public source.
The Kansas micro-case
Kansas is the second well-mapped state. Its 2026 Annual Feedlot Report covers 255 yards totaling 4.69M head of capacity — extremely good coverage. But Kansas is a small Montana destination: only 33,270 head in 2023, less than 4% of out-of-state flow. The Kansas tier distribution is informative as a comparison case but not material to the Montana-flow conclusion.
| Tier (Kansas) | Share of KS capacity | Allocated MT head |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership-captive | 7.8% | 2,602 |
| Geographic-captive | 22.6% | 7,521 |
| Remote | 37.9% | 12,605 |
| Multi-plant choice | 31.7% | 10,541 |
| Captive subtotal | 30.4% | 10,123 |
Kansas’s captive subtotal — 30.4% — comes in remarkably close to Nebraska’s 30.8%. Kansas has a higher multi-plant-choice share (31.7% vs 16.5%) because the southwest-Kansas plant cluster (Cargill Dodge City, Tyson Holcomb, National Beef Liberal) is the single densest fed-beef plant geography in the country. Nebraska has more truly remote feedyard country in the Sandhills.
The convergence around 30% captive between two states with different dominant operators and different geographies is a useful signal: that share is not a Nebraska-specific artifact. But two states are not enough to say the same share holds in the states we cannot map.
Where data is partial: the named-yard inventory
For Texas, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona we have ownership-tier yards (the corporate chains documented on company yard pages) but no comprehensive independent-yard population. Here we can only sketch a what-if: if Montana cattle in each state were spread across all the cattle on feed there, how many would the named corporate yards hold? These are illustrations, not minimums. Montana cattle could have gone mostly to other yards in the state — or mostly to these — and nothing in the public data tells us which. The figures also mix years (2023 cattle movements, December 2025 cattle on feed, current yard capacities) and compare yard capacity, the most a yard can hold, with cattle actually on feed, which tends to overstate the named yards’ share.
- Colorado (65,503 MT head): Five Rivers Cattle Feeding (sold by JBS to Pinnacle Asset Management in 2018, with a supply agreement to JBS) lists five Colorado feedyards on its location pages — Yuma (105,000 head), Kuner near Kersey (98,000), Gilcrest near LaSalle (60,000), Colorado Beef at Lamar (56,000) and Montera near LaSalle (20,000) — about 339,000 head of named ownership-captive (corporate-chain) capacity. Against Colorado’s 910,000 head on feed on December 1, 2025 (USDA-NASS), a proportional spread would put ~24,400 Montana head in Five Rivers yards. That is an illustration, not a floor: no public record shows how many Montana cattle those yards actually received. Separately, other Colorado yards may sell to JBS or Cargill under marketing agreements that aren’t visible in the ownership data.
- Idaho (66,549 MT head): the named captives are Simplot Land & Livestock’s Grand View feedlot (150,000 head in the FAT dataset; Simplot’s own page gives acreage, not head capacity) and Five Rivers’ Interstate Feedlot near Malta (54,500 head). Against Idaho’s 345,000 head on feed on December 1, 2025, the same proportional what-if puts ~39,400 Montana head — a little over half of the Montana → Idaho flow — in those two yards. Again, a scenario, not a count. Beef Northwest, a Wilson family feeding company based in Boardman, Oregon, with feedyards in Oregon and Washington, is not part of Agri Beef; it may take additional Montana cattle that cross Idaho, but it is not in our yard data.
- Texas (9,431 MT head): Five Rivers (Coronado and XIT near Dalhart, and Hartley, in the northwest Texas Panhandle), Cactus Feeders (multiple yards) and Friona Industries dominate the corporate-yard footprint. Against Texas’s statewide 2.61M head on feed (December 1, 2025), MT’s 9K-head Texas flow is small enough that the per-yard allocation is noise, so Texas is left out of the total below.
- Arizona (negligible direct MT flow): Pinal Feeding (150K) and Five Rivers McElhaney (80K) are the named captives. Most Arizona feeding is for cattle from Mexico and the southwest rather than Montana.
Adding these what-if figures to the Nebraska and Kansas allocations gives about 90,800 head of Montana cattle (about 9.2% of the 990,376 head analyzed) in ownership-captive (corporate-chain) yards across NE + KS + CO + ID under the capacity-share assumption (24,354 + 2,602 + ~24,400 + ~39,400). This is a scenario, not a floor or a minimum, and not a count of confirmed shipments to those yards; the real number could be higher or lower. (Correcting Five Rivers’ ownership does not change it: Five Rivers was counted in this tier as a large corporate chain, and it still is.) The geographic tier in Colorado, Idaho and Texas is unknown from the public data we found.
Where data is absent: the 61% problem
For South Dakota (183,941 MT head, 18.6% of out-of-state flow), Washington (84,655), Iowa (76,230), Wyoming (73,105), Minnesota (65,668), North Dakota (55,298), and Alberta (41,315) — and several smaller destinations — we did not locate a comprehensive public feedyard directory at the level needed for tier classification. State-level feeder associations vary widely in disclosure practice. Some states publish active yard lists; some publish only county totals; for some we found nothing. Permits, ownership filings or other agency records could still fill part of this gap; we have not exhausted them.
This is not a small data gap. It is 603,267 head — 60.9% of the 990,376 head analyzed, or about 59.6% of all 1,012,449 head that left Montana — in destinations where we cannot say what tier of yard the cattle land in. That includes the second-largest destination state (South Dakota) and the entire Pacific Northwest corridor.
What we can credibly conclude
Three findings are robust enough to defend at this data quality:
- In the two well-mapped Corn Belt destinations, roughly 30% of feedyard capacity is in ownership- or geographic-captive yards — so, under our capacity-share assumption, roughly 30% of Montana’s inbound cattle would land in them. The capacity shares are consistent across Nebraska (30.8%) and Kansas (30.4%); the Montana head counts built on them are allocations, not traced shipments. We do not know whether the same share holds in the states we cannot map. As a rough what-if only — not a finding — if it did, about 300,000 of the 990,376 head analyzed would be in ownership- or geographic-captive yards, plus an unknown share in contract-based captivity that public data cannot see.
- Idaho looks unusually concentrated. Simplot’s Grand View yard and Five Rivers’ Interstate yard together have capacity equal to roughly 59% of Idaho’s December 2025 on-feed inventory. If Montana cattle were spread in proportion, roughly 39,000 of Montana’s 66,549-head Idaho flow would land in those two corporate-chain operations. That is a scenario, not a count, but on the yard map Idaho is the most concentrated of Montana’s partly mapped destinations. Producers shipping to Idaho should treat that concentration as a real bargaining factor.
- The biggest finding is the gap. The 61% of Montana’s out-of-state cattle that land in unmapped destination-state feedyard populations is itself a structural transparency problem. The Department of Livestock’s 2023 release was an important first step. The next step is destination-state yard disclosure — either through expanded LMR coverage that names yards rather than just regions, or through state-level feeder-association reporting that matches the Kansas Annual Feedlot Report and Nebraska Cattle Feeders Directory templates that already exist.
What this changes for the Montana producer
Two implications, both modest enough to act on without overstating what the data supports:
- Within Nebraska and Kansas, the ~30% captive share of yard capacity is high enough that channel selection matters. A producer who knows their buyer is an Adams Land & Cattle or Gibraltar yard in Nebraska — or, farther south, a yard owned by Friona Industries, which is based in Amarillo with yards in the Texas Panhandle — is shipping into a large corporate-chain yard, which the FAT framework treats as ownership-captive. The premium and bargaining trade-off may still be worth it, but the choice should be made knowingly. A producer whose buyer is one of the multi-plant-choice yards (the southwest-Kansas plant cluster, the Cargill-Schuyler corridor in eastern Nebraska) is in a structurally less captive market.
- Idaho-bound cattle are flowing into a structurally concentrated buyer market, even if the per-cwt prices look attractive. Producers shipping west should weigh that concentration against the verified-natural-program premiums that the PNW corridor is willing to pay. The corridor is real and the premiums are real; the buyer concentration is also real.
Methodology and Data
- Flow data: Montana Department of Livestock BE-10 brand-inspection records, calendar year 2023, FOIA release March 2026. Of 1,664,873 head inspected, 652,424 stayed in Montana and 1,012,449 left the state; that full out-of-state total is the one used by the companion paper Where Montana’s Cattle Land and Honest Cattle’s brand-data page. This paper analyzes the 990,376 head that went to Montana’s 14 largest destinations — 13 states and Alberta, each receiving at least 9,106 head (Nebraska, South Dakota, Washington, Iowa, Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota, Colorado, North Dakota, Alberta, Kansas, Utah, Texas and California). The other 22,073 head of the 1,012,449 total went to some three dozen smaller destinations, led by Nevada (6,698 head) and including 624 head with no destination recorded, and are left out. Every percentage in this paper uses 990,376 as its base; using the larger total would lower them by less than two percentage points (the 61% unmapped share, for example, becomes about 59.6%) and would not change any finding.
- Yard population data: FAT supply-map dataset — Kansas Annual Feedlot Report 2026 (255 yards), Nebraska Cattle Feeders Directory (120 yards; 122 Nebraska yards in all once FAT’s manually added corporate yards are included), Five Rivers Cattle Feeding public yard pages, Friona Industries, and 12 manually-added corporate-chain yards from company-website sources (Adams Land & Cattle, Simplot, Pinal Feeding, additional Cactus Feeders and Five Rivers yards). Comprehensive coverage in KS and NE; partial coverage (corporate yards only) in TX, CO, ID, AZ; no coverage we could find in SD, WA, IA, WY, MN, ND, AB.
- Plant network: Big Four fed-beef slaughter plants plus key independents in the FAT supply-map dataset as of January 2026 (reflects the Tyson Lexington, NE closure). Since then, Tyson announced in August 2026 that it is closing its Joslin, Ill. beef plant and seeking a buyer for its Pasco, Wash. plant.
- Tier classification: per the FAT four-tier framework. Ownership classification by yard name match against documented corporate operators; a large corporate chain counts as ownership-captive whether or not a packer owns it, and a documented supply agreement (such as Five Rivers’ with JBS) is noted as a marketing commitment, not ownership. Geographic classification by count of plants within 50 miles, computed as straight-line distance from plant lat/lon. We have not tested other distance cutoffs or road distances, so the geographic tiers are a proximity measure, not proof of which packers a yard actually sells to.
- Allocation method: within each well-mapped destination state, Montana inbound is allocated across yards proportionally to yard capacity. This is a model, not a trace; we did not find yard-level destination data in any public source.
- Partial-state what-if calculation: for partial-coverage states, the named corporate-chain yard capacity is divided by the state’s cattle-on-feed inventory (USDA–NASS, December 1, 2025: Colorado 910,000; Idaho 345,000; Texas 2.61M) and applied to the Montana flow (Colorado: 339,000 ÷ 910,000 × 65,503 ≈ 24,400; Idaho: 204,500 ÷ 345,000 × 66,549 ≈ 39,400). This is an illustrative scenario, not a lower bound: Montana cattle could all have gone to other yards. Yard capacity is the most a yard can hold, not what it actually fed, and the inputs come from different dates (2023 movements, current yard capacities, December 2025 inventory), so these are rough what-ifs only.
Companion analyses
- Where Montana’s Cattle Went in 2023 — the source flow paper.
- Where Montana’s Cattle Land — destination-state market structure.
- Captive in Practice (FAT) — the four-tier captivity framework this paper applies.
- FAT Captivity Tiers Map — every classified feedyard color-coded by tier.
- FAT Feedlot Supply Map — the complete mapped feedyard inventory underlying this analysis.
Methodology: capacity-weighted allocation of Montana 2023 BE-10 inbound flow across captivity tiers within each destination state — a model of where the cattle would land if spread by yard size, not a trace of actual shipments. Directory-based for Nebraska and Kansas; illustrative what-if figures only for Texas, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona; not computable from the public data we found for South Dakota, Washington, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Alberta. The 61% data gap is itself a finding. Underlying records: MT Department of Livestock (FOIA, 2023); FAT supply-map dataset (April 2026); USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed (Dec 2025); company yard pages for corporate-tier classification. Prepared with the assistance of AI.
Get Montana & Texas market analysis every Monday morning
Quarterly steer and heifer price ranges, the trade and policy backdrop, drought and forage signals, and our reading of how it all lands on the ranch — published weekly, with the assistance of AI.