Marathon Pundit: My Kansas Kronikles: Garden City, Kansas' Third Beef Kingdom

Thursday, September 13, 2007

My Kansas Kronikles: Garden City, Kansas' Third Beef Kingdom

Finally, my long promised return to My Kansas Kronikles.

Unlike most of the Great Plains, there is a population boom in southwestern Kansas. Not a big one, but considering most Plains counties are losing population, southwestern Kansas is bucking the trend.

The decades long population decline in the Great Plains has led to a suggestion by a married New Jersey academic couple, the Poppers, that most of the Great Plains should become a natural preserve called the Buffalo Commons, creating the world's largest national park.

Plains residents, those who are not buffalo, are for the most part not very receptive to their idea.

Distantly related to the American Bison are cows, and they've transformed southwestern Kansas in recent decades.

Below are the population growth pattern of the what I call Kansas' Three Beef Kingdoms.

First, Dodge City:

1960 13,520 20.0%
1970 14,127 4.5%
1980 18,001 27.4%
1990 21,129 17.4%
2000 25,176 19.2%

Now Liberal:

1960 13,813 48%
1970 13,862 0.003%
1980 14,911 7.6%
1990 16,573 11.15%
2000 19,666 18.7%

And now the mightiest of the Beef Kingdoms, Garden City.

1960 11,811 8.3%
1970 14,790 25.2%
1980 18,256 23.4%
1990 24,097 32.0%
2000 28,451 18.1%

Southwestern Kansas, as I noted in my last Liberal, Kansas post, has a soaring Hispanic population. By all accounts, most of the workers in area's beef processing plants are Hispanic, mostly immigrants from Mexico. The population increases in the three Beef Kingdoms, especially the most recent, can only be explained by this influx from south of the border.

Of course not every Hispanic in southwestern Kansas works at a slaughterhouse or a feed lot, some work at the local supermarket, others have started businesses catering to the newer residents.

Are some of new Kansans here legally? Absolutely. But many surely aren't, and recent ICE raids at other slaughterhouses have found many illegal immigrants on the payrolls, so there is no reason to believe the Beef Kingdoms should be any different.

If beef is, according to the industry's marketing slogan, "What's for Dinner," there is a good chance your dinner came from Kansas.

Just west of Garden City is a massive Tyson Foods beef processing plant. It employs about 3,000 people, and when I drove past the plant at 8:00pm on a late July weeknight, the parking lot was full. Either there is a heck of a lot of overtime being paid out by Tyson or the plant is operating 16--maybe even 24 hours--a day.

That's Garden City from the west, with an increasingly rare (more on that in a later post) wheat field in front.

Surrounding Garden City are cattle feed lots. That's one on the right. Feed lots can be found all over Kansas, but there are of course more near the Beef Kingdoms. The goal of feed lots to prepare the cattle for their final destination, while alive that is. That's one on the right.

As I remarked in my on-the-scene Treo blog from Garden City, the town doesn't smell very nice. Where there are cows, there is, well...stuff that comes out of cows. Not too far from Garden City, as I blogged last month, is western Kansas' largest wind farm. It's windy there, and well...use your imagination about the smell.

Ironically, Garden City, according to a local tourist brochure I picked up, got its name in the late 19th century when a passing hobo asked a woman tending to her garden what was the name of her town. The woman that it didn't have one yet, and the drifter answered back, "Well, that's a pretty garden, why don't you call your town "Garden City."