Dive Brief:

• Fire ripped through a Cargill meat-packing plant near Dodge City,KS, Monday evening. No injuries were reported.
• The plant is expected to remain closed for repairs for roughly through Friday, idling about 2,700 workers.
• The facility is said to be capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle per day. Shuttering a plant that size for a week has the potential to affect prices in the local cash market.

Dive Insight:

Have you ever been to Dodge City? It's a place both fascinating and sad. Dodge was once the center of the American beef industry. Hundreds of thousands of Texas longhorn cattle passed through the city's stockyards back in the late 1800s. The city became lodged in the American consciousness as the epitome of the Western frontier town -- filed with cowboys, gunslingers, saloons and brothels. Today the city is a decidedly unglamorous place. There's a tourism industry, but the town lost its status as a destination when "Gunsmoke" went off the air decades ago. 

But Dodge is still central to the meat-processing industry. The two biggest employers in town are Cargill and National Beef. In fact, the meat industry remains at the center of all life in western Kansas. And meat-packing jobs tend to pay pretty well by the standards of western Kansas. The fire at Cargill, which comes just days after rival Tyson was blasted by federal regulators for shoddy safety practices at its facility in Hutchinson, KS, should remind us of just how dangerous those jobs can be.