This is the second 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 — used the FOIA-released BE-10 brand-inspection records to document, for the first time at this granularity, that 60.8% of Montana’s inspected cattle left the state in 2023. This paper picks up the question one step downstream: once a Montana calf or yearling crosses the state line, what kind of market does it land in?
The honest answer is: not a single market. Montana cattle land in five very different ones, each with its own packer concentration, its own captive-supply pattern, its own freight economics, and its own bargaining position for the Montana shipper. This paper profiles the five states that received 62% of Montana’s 2023 out-of-state volume.
The five-state cut
| Rank (OOS) | State | Head (2023) | Share of total inspected | Dominant Montana origin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nebraska | 212,356 | 12.8% | Custer, Yellowstone, Fergus, Rosebud, Big Horn |
| 2 | South Dakota | 183,941 | 11.1% | Carter, Powder River, Fallon, Custer |
| 3 | Washington | 84,655 | 5.1% | Yellowstone, Beaverhead, Carbon, Madison |
| 4 | Iowa | 76,230 | 4.6% | Fergus, Rosebud, Custer, Fallon |
| 5 | Wyoming | 73,105 | 4.4% | Big Horn, Carbon, Beaverhead |
| Five-state subtotal | 630,287 | 37.9% | ||
Source: Montana Department of Livestock BE-10 brand inspections, calendar year 2023 (FOIA release, March 2026).
These five states accounted for 62.3% of Montana’s 1,012,449 head of out-of-state shipments in 2023 (the share of all inspected cattle is lower — 37.9% — because 39.2% of all inspected cattle stayed in Montana). The next five destinations (Idaho, Minnesota, Colorado, North Dakota, Alberta) accounted for another ~30% of out-of-state volume but represent smaller, more specialized flows that warrant their own treatment in a follow-up paper. A note on what these numbers count: each figure is head of cattle brand-inspected as they left Montana, sorted by the destination state recorded at inspection. It is not a count of unique animals, of purchases, or of the feedyard or plant where the cattle finally end up. The movement figures are for 2023; the feedlot, packing-plant and cattle-on-feed details below are later snapshots (dated where given) that describe these markets as they look now, not exactly as the 2023 cattle found them.
The five we focus on cluster cleanly into three corridors:
- The Corn Belt feeder corridor (NE + SD + IA): 472,527 head in 2023, the dominant flow, draws from eastern Montana cow-calf country.
- The Pacific Northwest corridor (WA): 84,655 head, a meaningful second channel concentrated in western Montana valleys.
- The Mountain West corridor (WY): 73,105 head, mostly cross-border to Wyoming feedlots from southeast Montana.
1. Nebraska — the largest market and the densest packer geography
Volume: 212,356 head from Montana in 2023 (12.8% of all inspected, 21.0% of out-of-state). The single largest destination state.
Where the cattle go: Nebraska had 2.67 million head on feed in feedlots of 1,000+ head on December 1, 2025 — the largest fed-cattle inventory of any state, according to USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed. Major commercial feedlots are concentrated in the central and west-central counties — Phelps, Custer, Cherry, Lincoln, Dawson, Hall — with corporate operators including Adams Land & Cattle (about 85,000 head at its yard south of Broken Bow and 125,000 across its Nebraska yards, per Rural Radio, 2024), Imperial Beef (Imperial), Oppliger (a Lincoln County yard expanded to 70,000 head, per the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame), and several large independents in the 30K–50K range.
Packer geography: Nebraska has the densest fed-beef plant network of any single state — Tyson Dakota City, JBS Grand Island, Cargill Schuyler, Greater Omaha Packing (independent), and the producer-owned Sustainable Beef plant at North Platte, which began processing cattle in May 2025. Tyson closed its Lexington beef plant, in west-central Nebraska’s Dawson County, in January 2026 (the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Center for Agricultural Profitability lists January 20, 2026); that closure tightened the packer geography in central Nebraska but did not eliminate competition because JBS Grand Island, Sustainable Beef and Cargill Schuyler remain reachable. In our reading, of the three corridors a Montana steer might land in, Nebraska likely has the most active competition between buyers in any given week. That is an inference from the plant map and the cash-trade data below, not a count of how many buyers actually bid; a plant list is a map of possible buyers, not a measure of real competition for a given pen of cattle.
What this means for the Montana shipper: Nebraska is, in principle, the best of the five states for cash-trade discovery (cash trade means fed cattle sold at a price negotiated that week, rather than on a formula or forward contract). Nebraska and Iowa sell a much larger share of their fed cattle on a negotiated cash basis than Kansas or the Texas–Oklahoma–New Mexico region: a 2022 Senate Agriculture Committee staff analysis, reported by DTN, found Nebraska and Iowa would need little change to meet a proposed regional cash-trade minimum, while Kansas and Texas–Oklahoma–New Mexico would have to shift roughly half their cattle out of formula arrangements. The Iowa-Minnesota and Nebraska reporting regions are where Montana cattle have the best chance of being sold into a market that has not yet been entirely captured by formula and forward contracts. That said, many larger commercial yards sell some or all of their cattle under marketing agreements with packers — so a Montana-origin yearling that lands in a big Nebraska yard may be, by the time it walks to slaughter, captive in the contractual sense even if it bought into Nebraska through what looked like an independent yard.
2. South Dakota — the eastern-Montana corridor
Volume: 183,941 head from Montana in 2023 (11.1% of all inspected, 18.2% of out-of-state). The second-largest destination, and the corridor with the cleanest geographic logic in the FOIA data.
Where the cattle come from: South Dakota took 37,851 head from Carter County alone — the most concentrated single-county flow we found in the 2023 dataset. Powder River, Fallon, Custer, and Garfield counties round out the top sources. This is the eastern Montana feeder belt shipping cleanly south and east into South Dakota’s southeastern feeding country.
Packer geography: South Dakota has limited fed-beef slaughter capacity within state lines — so most cattle finished in South Dakota are likely slaughtered in Iowa or Nebraska plants (a plausible route, not one the Montana inspection data measure). The state’s role in the Montana-cattle pipeline is primarily as a feeding state, not a slaughter state. South Dakota commercial feedlots are concentrated in the southeast — Bon Homme, Yankton, Hutchinson, Turner counties — and serve as a backgrounding and finishing intermediate before cattle move on to packers in adjacent states.
What this means for the Montana shipper: Selling into South Dakota is in some ways selling into a two-step pipeline — the cattle finish in SD but the price discovery happens at the slaughter plant a tier further down, often in Iowa or Nebraska. The Montana producer rarely interacts with the South Dakota buyer’s downstream packer relationship; that’s the SD feedlot’s contract to negotiate. The implication is that Carter and Powder River producers shipping to SD are price-takers vis-à-vis a market structure that has compounded captivity layers — formula contracts at the SD feedyard, formula or grid contracts at the IA/NE plant.
3. Washington — the Pacific Northwest channel
Volume: 84,655 head from Montana in 2023 (5.1% of all inspected, 8.4% of out-of-state). A smaller channel but a meaningful one, and structurally different from the Corn Belt.
Where the cattle come from: Yellowstone (20,910 head) and Beaverhead (12,329) led, with material flows from Carbon, Madison, and Cascade. This is the western Montana valleys and the Yellowstone Basin shipping west across Idaho into the Columbia Basin.
Packer geography: Washington’s fed-beef slaughter is heavily concentrated in two plants. One is Agri Beef’s Washington Beef plant at Toppenish. The other is Tyson’s beef plant on Dodd Road near Wallula, about 10 miles southeast of Pasco — the plant Tyson calls its Pasco plant. It is still operating, but in August 2026 Tyson announced it plans to sell the Pasco plant rather than close it, so who will own it is an open question. Beef Northwest, a large cattle-feeding company headquartered in Boardman, Oregon, with feedyards in Boardman and Nyssa, Oregon and Quincy and Warden, Washington, is owned by the Wilson family and is not part of Agri Beef (per Beef Northwest).
What this means for the Montana shipper: The PNW corridor is structurally more captive than the Corn Belt — there are fewer plants competing (essentially Toppenish and Tyson’s Pasco plant, which is now up for sale), Agri Beef both feeds and packs cattle (its own site describes ranching, cattle feeding and processing under one company), and the freight math out of western Montana to the Columbia Basin makes the choice set narrow. A 600 lb calf out of Beaverhead County shipped west has a small set of practical buyers. The trade-off, in our reading (we have not measured it in this paper), is that PNW buyers have often paid modest premiums over Corn Belt prices for cattle that fit Agri Beef’s and other Northwest finishing programs, particularly for natural and verified-genetics offerings. Where that premium exists, it is collected by a small number of buyers.
4. Iowa — the deep-feeder market
Volume: 76,230 head from Montana in 2023 (4.6% of all inspected, 7.5% of out-of-state).
Where the cattle come from: Fergus (5,405), Rosebud (5,392), Custer, Fallon, Carter — central and eastern Montana shipping further east, often as backgrounded yearlings rather than weaned calves.
Packer geography: Iowa’s main fed-beef plant is Iowa Premium Beef at Tama, which National Beef acquired in 2019. Tyson’s large Iowa plants at Storm Lake and Waterloo are pork plants (as was Perry, which Tyson closed in 2024), so they do not buy fed cattle. Iowa’s feeding industry — about 700,000 head on feed in feedlots of 1,000+ head on December 1, 2025 (USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed) — is heavy on smaller-scale corn-fed yards rather than the very large corporate yards typical of Texas Panhandle feeding country. The state’s role is at the sweet spot of the Corn Belt: relatively close to Tyson Dakota City and the Nebraska plant network as well, so a feedyard in northwest Iowa has multiple plant choices in any given week.
What this means for the Montana shipper: Iowa is where Montana yearlings that have been backgrounded — held over the winter at intermediate weights — most often land. The freight math from eastern Montana to Iowa is similar to the freight math to Nebraska, and many Iowa buyers are simultaneously Nebraska-active. Like Nebraska, Iowa sells a comparatively large share of its fed cattle on a negotiated cash basis (see the Nebraska section above), which makes the Iowa channel one of the better cash-discovery destinations from a Montana producer’s standpoint. The constraint is that the Iowa-bound cattle are typically heavier and more specifically-sorted, which means the producer side of the transaction often runs through video auction or order-buyer relationships rather than a public sale-barn channel.
5. Wyoming — the southern-Montana cross-border flow
Volume: 73,105 head from Montana in 2023 (4.4% of all inspected, 7.2% of out-of-state).
Where the cattle come from: Big Horn County alone shipped 22,656 head to Wyoming — the highest single-county-to-single-state flow in the dataset after Carter→South Dakota. Carbon, Beaverhead, Powder River, and Yellowstone counties also contributed.
Packer geography: Wyoming has very limited fed-beef slaughter capacity in-state. Cattle that finish in Wyoming feedlots are likely slaughtered in Nebraska (JBS Greeley CO is across the state line in northern Colorado but reachable from southern Wyoming feedyards) or in the Front Range Colorado plants further south — a plausible route, not one the Montana inspection data measure. Wyoming’s role is overwhelmingly as a feeding state, with major commercial yards in Goshen, Platte, and Laramie counties.
What this means for the Montana shipper: The Wyoming destination is best understood as a cross-border continuation of the Big Horn Basin and southeast Montana feeding region. The cattle that move from Big Horn County into Wyoming feedyards are not really crossing into a different market structure — the same buyers, the same packer relationships, the same feed-corn-and-protein economics on either side of the line. The interesting structural question is why these cattle are inspected as crossing into Wyoming at all rather than staying in Montana feedlots; the answer is freight economics and the lack of equivalent commercial-scale finishing capacity in southeast Montana.
Themes that cut across the five states
Three patterns emerge from the five-state profile that are worth flagging directly:
1. The Corn Belt corridor accounts for nearly half of out-of-state volume
NE + SD + IA together took 472,527 head from Montana in 2023 — that is 28.4% of all inspected cattle and 46.7% of out-of-state shipments. This is the canonical Montana feeder-cattle story. It is also where the most active cash-trade discovery happens (Nebraska, Iowa) and where the contract-based captivity discussion (formula, forward, marketing-agreement) plays out most consequentially for Montana producers in dollar terms. If you want to understand Montana cattle marketing, you need to understand the structure of the Corn Belt feedyard-to-packer corridor first, because that is where the bulk of the state’s calves end up.
2. Two of the five states have very limited in-state slaughter
South Dakota and Wyoming are essentially feeding states, not slaughter states, with respect to Montana cattle. Most of the 184K head that entered SD and the 73K head that entered WY in 2023 are likely to have gone to slaughter in Iowa, Nebraska, or northern Colorado plants in a later move that does not show up in Montana’s brand-inspection data — a reasonable expectation from the plant map, not a measured route. This means the FOIA dataset does not show the eventual packer destination of about 257,000 head — a quarter of all Montana out-of-state movement. Any complete picture of where Montana cattle are killed and processed has to bridge the FOIA data with downstream cattle-on-feed and slaughter data from the destination states.
3. The Pacific Northwest corridor is structurally captive — but pays for it
Washington has fewer plants and tighter vertical integration than the Corn Belt. Agri Beef, which runs one of the state’s two main fed-beef plants, also feeds cattle, so some Montana-origin cattle landing in Washington enter a system where the feeding, packing, and marketing decisions are made within one corporate footprint. The other main plant, Tyson’s at Pasco, is up for sale, which adds uncertainty about future buyer competition. Producers shipping into the PNW corridor accept that structure in exchange for what is often a modest price premium (our reading, not measured here), particularly for natural and verified-genetics cattle. Montana producers shipping west should understand that they are entering a structurally more concentrated buyer market than the Corn Belt offers.
What the literature says
This paper draws on three bodies of literature, each handled briefly and pointed to fuller treatments rather than rehearsed in detail:
Government data and analysis. USDA-AMS Livestock Mandatory Reporting publishes weekly cash-trade shares by reporting region; the 2007 RTI International Livestock and Meat Marketing Study (commissioned by USDA-GIPSA) remains the canonical federal study of alternative marketing arrangements in fed-cattle procurement; USDA Economic Research Service’s recurring U.S. Beef Industry series and Cattle and Beef Outlook reports document the structural shifts in regional feeding and slaughter capacity. The Congressional Research Service’s recurring report by Joel Greene, U.S. Beef Industry: Background and Issues for Congress, is the cleanest non-advocacy summary of the captive-supply / cash-trade debate that frames the structural questions raised in this paper.
Trade association positions. R-CALF USA, the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), and Farm Action have produced multiple papers on Montana-specific market access, packer concentration, and the cash-trade question — these are the closest publicly-available treatments of the Montana shipper’s perspective. The Montana Stockgrowers Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the Meat Institute publish industry-side positions that emphasize the efficiency arguments for current marketing structure. The producer’s working library should include both sides.
Academic research. Schroeter and Azzam’s foundational oligopsony work on cattle slaughter (1991, 1995) and Azzam’s Captive Supplies, Market Conduct, and the Open-Market Price (1998) are the entry points. Crespi, Saitone & Sexton (2012) and Saitone & Sexton (2017) frame the efficiency-vs-market-power tradeoff. Tonsor, Mintert and the Kansas State extension series cover feedlot economics and basis behavior in the Corn Belt corridor. Iowa State University extension livestock economist Lee Schulz covers Iowa cattle markets and feeder marketing. Montana State University Extension publishes producer-facing guides on out-of-state marketing, freight economics, and channel selection.
For the structural framework that connects ownership, contract, and geographic captivity, see the companion FAT Research paper: Captive in Practice: Why “Independent” Is the Wrong Word for Most U.S. Cattle Feedlots. The Montana cattle covered in this paper land, by the time they reach a packer, in feedyards that are themselves classifiable into the four-tier captivity scheme that paper introduces.
Implications for the Montana producer
Three things follow that are concrete enough to act on:
- The destination state matters more than the freight invoice suggests. Two cattle of identical type going to two different states sit in two different market structures by the time they reach slaughter. A Montana yearling that lands in Nebraska is in a market with comparatively more negotiated cash trade and several fed-beef plants within freight range. The same yearling shipped to Washington enters a market with a fraction of that competitive density. Producers who are deciding between video-auction lots that route to different destinations should treat that destination difference as a real factor, not a wash.
- Backgrounding decisions are channel-routing decisions. Cattle backgrounded over winter to a heavier yearling weight are far more likely to land in Iowa, Nebraska, or Wyoming than calves shipped at weaning. The decision to background changes which destination market the cattle eventually enter — and therefore which packer geography determines the price. This shows up in the FOIA data as the fall-shipping pulse (calves in October) versus the spring-shipping pulse (yearlings in May/June).
- The PNW premium is real but narrow. Western Montana producers with verified-genetics, source-and-age cattle that fit Agri Beef’s or other Northwest natural programs may capture a per-head premium that more than offsets the freight differential to Washington. Producers without that program fit are likely better served by the Corn Belt corridor where buyer competition compensates for not having a specific natural-program premium.
Methodology and Data
- Volume data: Montana Department of Livestock BE-10 brand-inspection records, calendar year 2023, released to Honest Cattle in March 2026 under public-records request. 39,003 inspection rows; 1,664,873 head; every Montana county of inspection and every destination state. The 1,012,449 out-of-state figure used here is all inspected head minus the 652,424 that stayed in Montana. See the source paper Where Montana’s Cattle Went in 2023 for the full dataset description and caveats.
- Plant network: Big Four fed-beef slaughter plants plus key independents in the FAT supply-map dataset as of January 2026, reflecting the Tyson Lexington, NE closure (January 2026) and Tyson’s move to one shift at Amarillo. Since then, Tyson announced in August 2026 that it is closing its Joslin, Ill. beef plant, resuming a second shift at Amarillo, and seeking a buyer for its Pasco, Wash. plant. Plant locations and capacities sourced from company pages, trade press, and the FAT supply-map dataset.
- Feeding state inventories: USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed monthly reports, December 1, 2025 inventory (released December 19, 2025), feedlots of 1,000+ head.
- Cash-trade comparison by region: the regional comparison in the body is qualitative, based on a 2022 Senate Agriculture Committee staff analysis reported by DTN; the underlying weekly data are published through USDA-AMS Livestock Mandatory Reporting (LMR).
Companion analyses
- Where Montana’s Cattle Went in 2023 — the source paper for this analysis (statewide overview, October pulse, top-county profiles).
- Every Montana county page on Honest Cattle now carries a 2023 movement appendix with that county’s specific destination breakdown — see Big Horn County for the Wyoming corridor, Carter County for the South Dakota corridor, Yellowstone County for the Washington corridor.
- Captive in Practice (FAT, sister site) — the structural framework on ownership, contract, and geographic captivity that the destination-state profiles in this paper build on.
- FAT Captivity Tiers Map — every commercial feedlot in the FAT dataset color-coded by captivity tier; useful for visualizing the Corn Belt vs PNW vs Mountain West concentration patterns described above.
Methodology: figures derived from MT Department of Livestock BE-10 brand-inspection records (2023, FOIA release March 2026), USDA-NASS Cattle on Feed reports, USDA-AMS LMR data, and trade-press plant capacity reporting. The five-state cut covers 62.3% of Montana’s 2023 out-of-state shipment volume; the next paper in this series will profile Idaho, Minnesota, Colorado, North Dakota, and Alberta as the second-tier destination markets. Prepared with the assistance of AI; the underlying records are the Department’s and the published government and academic literature.
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