Cargill Fort Morgan Workers Ratify the Deal They Refused

Teamsters at Cargill’s Fort Morgan beef plant voted 1,113 to 211 on Aug. 17, ending an 89-day lockout of more than 1,700 workers. Harvesting is still slated only for the week of Sept. 7, and the cattle that used to die in Colorado have been rolling into Kansas, Nebraska and Texas since April.

Cargill, ranked by Forbes as the country’s largest private company, said the first people would come back around Aug. 24 under a five-year contract. The vote closed the labor file. It did not put a single steer back on the rail.

1,113 Workers Voted Yes After 89 Idle Days

Dean Modecker, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 455, told The Colorado Sun the Aug. 17 feeling in the room was different from the anger that killed a tentative deal two weeks earlier. Members had collected more than 1,000 signatures asking to vote again. About 300 members sat the third ballot out, he said.

The union paid $1,250 a week for the first two months, a sum the international helped cover, then dropped that support after the Aug. 3 no vote to $125 a week plus five times a member’s dues, The Colorado Sun reported. Workers never took a strike vote. Cargill locked the doors anyway, saying it could not run a live-animal plant if a walkout hit mid-shift.

Modecker tied the yes vote to a fact members could not ignore: Tyson had just shut a beef plant in Illinois.

It was just a different feeling today. Two weeks ago, when we voted, I feel the anger was still there. And then after two weeks of looking at the deal, I believe people just realized it’s time to go back to work. Since we’re not hiding anything, I’m sure you heard, just like we did, that Tyson Beef shut down a plant.

Dean Modecker, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 455, to The Colorado Sun

Chris Suazo, a Local 455 business agent, told The Fort Morgan Times he still called the outcome a win. He also said the contract did not include everything the union wanted, even with tighter language on jobs, safety and breaks.

Harvesting Still Waits Until Early September

Cargill’s own labor update, dated Aug. 17, is blunt about the lag. People will be paid for the training and assigned work they actually report for, and those assignments will differ by room because the plant has been paused for months. Maintenance crews go in first, Suazo said, to check equipment, then retraining and safety sign-offs before a full run.

April Nelson, Cargill’s senior director of reputation management, said employee safety, food safety and operational readiness will guide every step, with meatpacking aimed at the week of Sept. 7. That is roughly three weeks after the vote and almost five months after Cargill stopped killing cattle at the site on April 23, while still paying workers under the old weekly guarantee.

The old contract expired Feb. 22. Cargill says it does not expect material impacts to suppliers or customers while the restart crawls, and that it will keep using the rest of its network until Fort Morgan is ready. Harvesting starts only after training, cattle and the floor itself are signed off, the company said, with broader operations following in phases.

Kansas, Nebraska and Texas Absorbed the Cattle

From late April on, Fort Morgan-bound cattle were sent to three other Cargill beef plants. The company covered the extra freight, spokesperson Hli Yang told The Colorado Sun, which is how a Colorado lockout could last 89 days without opening a hole in the national boxed-beef pipeline.

WHERE THE CATTLE WENT

• Dodge City, Kansas: UFCW Local 2 ratified its own deal on May 23, three days after the Fort Morgan lockout, and Cargill says that contract is separate.
• Schuyler, Nebraska: One of the High Plains plants that took Colorado cattle while Fort Morgan sat dark.
• Friona, Texas: The southern end of the same detour, stretching a Colorado fed-cattle haul much farther south.

A local feedlot manager who finishes about 56,000 cattle a year told The Colorado Sun in July that Cargill was current on cattle it had already bought, but was not bidding on new ones. That is the quiet cost of a lockout in cattle country: one fewer nearby packer on the bid sheet, even when the animals still get killed somewhere else.

David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M University, told Brownfield Ag News the Fort Morgan restart is good news if the goal is higher cattle prices, because another running plant is another buyer. Daily slaughter capacity there is about 4,700 head, he said. Drovers put the plant at that full-run figure and said it had been averaging about 4,000 head a day before the halt. Union officials had put the pre-lockout pace closer to 2,500 head a day, a gap that shows how far under its own roof the plant was already running.

Tyson’s Joslin Shutdown Leaves a Bigger Hole

Four days before the Fort Morgan revote, Tyson Foods told workers at Joslin, Illinois, that harvest was ending that day. The plant killed about 3,000 cattle a day. Illinois officials put the job loss near 2,500. The UFCW said the shutdown hit more than 2,000 Joslin union jobs represented by Local 1546, with no advance notice.

Anderson told Brownfield that Fort Morgan coming back does not make up for Joslin, because losing that Illinois plant pulls more cattle into an already tight Plains packing belt. Feeders in Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana now truck farther, he said, and someone pays that freight in a lower bid.

USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service counted 86.2 million cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, slightly below a year earlier, with beef cows at 27.6 million, down 1%. Reuters, writing on the Fort Morgan vote, put the national herd at its smallest in 75 years and said packers are posting beef losses as cattle costs outrun meat prices. Tyson is now wrapping its remaining beef kill around Dakota City, Nebraska; Holcomb, Kansas; and Amarillo, Texas. It closed Lexington, Nebraska, earlier this year, a plant Reuters said had about 3,200 workers and could process roughly 5,000 cattle a day.

Cargill has been trimming too. A February WARN notice, reported by Feedstuffs, said the Milwaukee ground-beef plant would stop production around April 17 and close around May 31, cutting 221 jobs. Last year the company closed a turkey plant in Springdale, Arkansas. Fort Morgan is the plant that stayed on the map. It still has to prove it can take cattle back from three sister plants that have been running those loads for months.

City Hall Cut Spending While the Plant Sat Idle

Fort Morgan’s problem was never boxed beef. It was the payroll, the water meter and the electric bill. The Denver Post reported that about 20% of the town works at Cargill and that the company accounts for about 15% of annual city revenue. The plant sits on about 85 acres east of Main Street, with some 630,000 square feet of production space. It opened in 1966 and has been Cargill’s since 1987.

FORT MORGAN ON THE LINE

• Worst-case hole: City Manager Brent Nation warned that a dark plant would take about $15 million out of a $100 million annual budget.
• Cuts already made: A hiring freeze and a 5% trim to remaining 2026 department budgets went in during the lockout.
• Money already gone: After a July tentative deal, Nation put the lockout’s revenue loss at $3 million to $5 million and said he no longer expected city layoffs if the plant returned.
• After the yes vote: At an Aug. 20 town hall, covered Aug. 25 by The Fort Morgan Times, Nation said budget fears had eased after the settlement and that indoor-pool construction was still aimed at early November.

When members voted the July deal down on Aug. 3, Nation said the city was extremely disappointed and put 15% cuts for 2027 back on the table. State Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, said the fight had put an enormous burden on local businesses, cattle producers, workers and the town, and that people who live there know the plant’s long-term future is the stake. Colorado had already taken 502 unemployment claims from Cargill workers by July 27, a state labor department spokesperson told The Colorado Sun.

What the Five-Year Contract Pays Workers

Cargill has refused to publish the full grid. “We are not providing additional details about the ratified contract,” its Fort Morgan update says. What leaked out still shows why members first said no, then said yes.

The Colorado Sun, citing Cargill, said the new five-year deal lifts the average first-year hourly range to $24.20 to $32.10, depending on the job, against an old base that started at $23.50. Modecker told Reuters first-year base pay rises by a total of $1.40 an hour. Figures Cargill gave the Star Tribune put the raise at $2.15 an hour over five years, with a $1,000 bonus in 2029 instead of a raise that year. The company’s original pitch, the one that started the lockout, was an estimated $33.4 million over five years.

Modecker told Reuters, “It’s not the deal that we were hoping to get.” Members had wanted more money in years four and five and did not want those years locked if beef margins recovered, he told The Colorado Sun. “We’re hoping they’re profitable, but in the next three years, if they become profitable, hopefully they reopen that contract and give these people what they deserve.” He also listed gains that are not on the wage line: seniority language, safety language and bathroom breaks. Cargill had said breaks were already scheduled and that extra restroom trips go through a request process.

A wage bump at one Colorado plant does not restock the herd, and packers will keep arguing that labor costs show up in the meat case. That objection sat under the thin public argument after the vote, including a jab under Sen. Michael Bennet’s note that 1,700 Coloradans would return with better pay. The tighter bind is the one Modecker named: workers who live on a weekly check, a strike fund that shrank, and a rival packer that had just erased a plant.

Maintenance Crews Come Back Before the Cattle Do

Cargill told the union it would start calling people as early as the week of the vote. Suazo said maintenance goes first. The company has not posted a public confirmation that those crews are on the floor, and its labor page was still dated Aug. 17 as of this writing. City Hall, at least, has already spent the settlement, moving a pool timeline that had been hostage to the lockout.

1. Feb. 22, 2026: The prior contract expires and talks continue.
2. April 23, 2026: Cargill stops harvesting at Fort Morgan and still pays workers under the weekly guarantee.
3. May 20, 2026: After members reject the company’s last offer, Cargill starts the lockout and stops pay.
4. May 23, 2026: Dodge City workers ratify a separate UFCW deal.
5. July 28, 2026: Cargill and Local 455 reach a recommended settlement.
6. Aug. 3, 2026: Members reject that deal by 25 votes.
7. Aug. 13, 2026: Tyson ends harvest at Joslin.
8. Aug. 17, 2026: Fort Morgan members vote 1,113 to 211 to ratify.
9. Aug. 24, 2026: First employees are due back, on staggered schedules.
10. Week of Sept. 7, 2026: Cargill aims to restart harvest.

Local 455 said it will stay on the ground to enforce the new terms, and it warned that the 30-day return “may be bumpy as different job classifications return on different schedules.” Until training, cattle and the floor line up, Cargill will keep those loads on the Kansas, Nebraska and Texas circuit. Fort Morgan gets its jobs back first. The cattle come later.