Courtesy Photo/Image North Platte Feeders, at present. The photo was shot toward the northwest, looking across the pens to the feed mill.

Courtesy Photo/Image New pens outlined to the east and some to the west in this enhanced aerial photograph. (Source: Lincoln County Planning and Zoning Office.)

The largest cattle feed yard in Lincoln County is expanding in the hills south of North Platte.

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It is not a small expansion.

North Platte Feeders, which feeds about 40,000 head, will have room to feed more than 80,000 head when the expansion is complete.

The feed yard is 17 miles south of North Platte and one mile east along Echo School Road.

Dirt moving equipment has been working steadily for nearly a month, neighbors say.

On April 8, the Lincoln County Planning Commission officially approved the expansion. In doing so, the commission agreed to allow the owners to build 190 expansive new pens, plus another 45 "half-size" pens.

Currently, the feedlot has more than 200 pens, all smaller than the new pens.

North Platte Feeders already had permission to feed up to 81,800 cattle; nearly twice as many as are currently fed at the yard. The feed yard obtained that permission in 2000 and 2003, under county zoning regulations that allowed the yard to double in size once it obtained an initial permit.

But the feed yard didn’t really have the space to expand, so this time it came before the planning commission to request a bigger “footprint.”

The planning commission’s vote was unanimous, county zoning director Jim Perry said.

Now, the feed yard has room to grow. Plenty of room.

Nearly 20 years ago, now

North Platte Feeders was founded in the 1989 by Jack and son Dean McCaffery. Jack McCaffery had already spent a lifetime on ranches and feedlots. He grew up feeding cattle on an Oregon farm, and during his career managed feedlots in Oregon, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.

At a time when many people consider retirement, McCaffery organized a company and bought the land for the feed yard. He was 58 years old.

McCaffery liked the location, with ample water in the Ogallala aquifer, U.S. Highway 83 nearby, plus lots of corn and alfalfa nearby, and ranches in the surrounding hills. And, there were plenty of beef processing plants in surrounding counties and states to buy the cattle when they were finished.

Jack and Dean did all the preparation work, shaping the land from the hills so the pens would gently slope and the cattle would remain high and dry despite bad weather.

It was the feed yard of his dreams and widely admired. Even 15 years later, an agricultural writer called in a “High-Tech, High-Touch Beef Hotel.”

It was a “43,000-head feedlot that came to be called an industry ‘Cadillac,’” said writer Steve Ritcher for “Cooperative Partners”, a journal distributed through coop members, such as Lake ’O Lakes.

Jack McCaffery worked at the yard everyday, often putting in 70-hour weeks, Ritcher said. His sincere, humble mannerisms were accompanied by an easy-going grin and a twinkle in his eye. He was a happy workaholic.

When Jack died in June 2006 at age 75, he was widely mourned. His family held a simple graveyard ceremony in keeping with his wishes.

New owners arrive

In early 2007, new owners took over at North Platte Feeders, headed by famed Nebraska cattle feeder Bob Gottsch.

North Platte Feeders is now a partnership between Gottsch Cattle Company and four other cattlemen, including Jeff Biegert, who is affiliated with a cattle feed yard in Shickley as well as a regional liquid supplement cattle feed company – Midwest PMS.

Also, three central California cattlemen are partners in NP Feeders — David Wood, Don Devine and John Lacey.

Wood and Devine jointly own a cattle company some 50 miles southwest of Fresno. Lacey is a partner in Centennial Livestock on the edge of the Mojave Desert, about 30 miles southeast of Bakersfield.

Gottsch is a legendary name in Nebraska’s beef business. The company was founded by Bob Gottsch, Sr. and is now operated by sons and grandsons, Gottsch began acquiring its first large feed yard near Juniata in 1975. Bob Gottsch eventually bought the entire Juniata yard, which has a capacity of 42,000 head.

In 1984, the Gottsch company bought into a western Kansas feed yard near Garden City, and now owns the whole yard, with a capacity of 50,000 head

In 1985, Gottsch Cattle Company bought a sizeable share of the Pawnee Springs Ranch five miles east of North Platte along U.S. Highway 30. Today Pawnee Springs includes nearly seven square miles of Platte Valley bottomland plus nearly 15 square miles of pasture in the hills north of the valley.

According to the company’s website, the Gottsches operate other ranches in Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas.

And, in 1989 -- the same year McCaffery was building North Platte Feeders -- the Gottsch company built a new feed yard from the ground up near Red Cloud. That yard also has a 42,000 head capacity.

Other related businesses include home-delivered steaks, a farrow-to-finish swine operation and a line of swine genetics. Gottsch companies also provide Internet service to rural and urban communities, operate a golf course and are involved in commercial and residential development, their website says.

Mixed reviews

Neighbor Melvin Dikeman is not happy about the spreading North Platte Feeders.

Melvin was the only person to testify against the expansion April 8 when the issue officially came before the Lincoln County Planning Commission.

Melvin and wife Debbie live about a half-mile east of the feedyard. They bought 80-acres and moved there in 1995, with the idea of retiring in their home. Before they moved in, Melvin told the Bulletin they asked McCaffery if the feed yard intended to expand much more.

“He said ‘no,’” Melvin said.

According to the Dikemans, the feed yard can hardly control dust, flies and odor now, problems that are bound to get worse as the feed yard expands.

“I’m talking to a lawyer,” Melvin said.

“There’s been trouble in the past and it’s getting worse,” Debbie Dikeman said. “We don’t have cookouts anymore; I don’t open my windows to air out the house.”

“Basically, you smell urine and manure. The dust is bad. Sometimes it bothers us a lot,” she said.

Other neighbors are not as bothered. Charlie Weaver, who built a house three years ago on an 11-acre tract a little more than a mile north of the expanded yard, said his road got a little torn up last fall when trucks hauled silage to the feed yard from nearby cornfields. But Gottsch made things right, paying him a personal visit to ask forbearance and bringing equipment up to fix the road afterwards.

“I respect him for that,” Weaver said. “I like those guys.”

Gary Merritt, who lives about three miles east, said he guessed the expansion is all right, although “it’s going to be different than before.”

“It ain’t all bad,” he said. “It’s good for the community, for jobs and as a good place for farmers to take their corn.”

But the dust lies heavy around the feed yard on dry summer days, Gary said.

“A lot of neighbors are not really happy about it,” he said.

“We live east, so we very seldom get a west wind, but with the expansion it could get to be a bigger problem,” Gary said. “There is heavy dust in the summer down along the (Echo School) road through the valley. And, they will be feeding silage and distillers’ grains, which makes manure smell worse.”

Gary’s brother Roger, who also lives about three miles east of the expansion, said the feed yard operators “try to keep it cleaned up.”

Roger Merritt has a seat on the county planning commission, and wanted to serve there to help stick up for smaller farms and ranches. However, he said it is apparent to him now that big feed yards are as inevitable as Wal-Mart.

“There’s good and bad in all of them,” he said. “To be honest, the reason the feeders keep expanding is because state regulations make it too hard on smaller yards. The feed yards with 5,000 or 10,000 head can’t survive because of the cost of keeping up with the regulations.”

Also, it requires a lot of financial capital plus a good line of credit to operate a feed yard these days. Each animal costs from $750 to $1,000. Feed is at all-time record high prices, twice as high as traditional times.

Roger said the county planning commission listened to Dikeman’s complaints, but realized that he moved in after the feed yard was established.

McCaffery didn’t feed silage, but even so, all cattle yards naturally create odors.

“Nobody likes the smell,” Roger said, “but if you moved in afterwards, you had to know it could be a problem. The wind blows every which way around here.”

For emphasis, he added, “including straight down sometimes.”

Dealing with waste

The newest cattle pens will be slightly larger in size than the original pens, allowing more room per animal, which could help some to reduce flies, odors and dust, the feed yard designers told the planning commissioners.

Currently, waste water drains downhill from the cattle pens a half mile or more to the south, where it is routed under Echo School Road into holding basins. From there, the water is pumped through three center pivots further south.

To handle with the extra run off from the new pens, the owners plan to send it the other way.

First, they will construct more “debris” basins, then pipe wastewater uphill north for more than two miles, where it will be spread onto cropland through four more center pivots.

Two of those pivots are within about a half-mile of another home.

It will require lift stations to pump the wastewater that far north, Merritt said.

Drier manure is also loaded out of the pens into trucks and then spread on surrounding fields.

Flies

According to some of the 10 conditions spelled out in the permit, no cattle yard can spread waste or waste water, “whether sprayed, broadcast, knifed or injected” within 1,000 feet of any occupied dwelling “which existed prior to the date” of the conditional use permit application.

However, “dry animal waste” could be applied within 500 feet of those dwellings.

The rules are intended to reduce livestock odors near homes in the surrounding area.

Other regulations are written to keep waste away from water sources, and the toughest regulation of the permit is the last one of the list.

“Flies shall be controlled so as to limit fly population on neighboring properties to levels that would exist without the presence of the confined animal feeding operation.”

That was a stickler for the planning commissioners, Roger Merritt said.

Merritt said the commission realized that feed yards try to keep flies down, because flies annoy cattle and can carry disease, which hurts production and profits. Also, the commission realized that all cattle, even on pasture, tend to attract flies.

Still, there is no way anyone really believed that there are the same level of flies around the feed yard as would exist without its presence, he said.

But the feed yard already had permission to expand in numbers, if not in size, Merritt said, under the previous permits

“All we could say, was, if they could have a bigger footprint,” he said. “It was plain to see if they got it, that would help keep flies down.”

One less option to appeal zoning rulings

Thanks to a change in state law, all appeals of county planning commission decisions now must be filed in district court, instead of with the county “board of zoning adjustment.”

Because of a 2006 state law enacted by the Legislature, the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners officially changed the county’s zoning ordinances April 14. The board deleted the words “planning commission” from a pertinent phrase in the regulations the dealt with appeals, and approved the change, 3-0.

Although planning commission decisions can no longer be appealed to the board, the board of adjustment will continue to re-consider decisions of the administrative planning and zoning officer, if the decisions are appealed. .

County residents sit on both the planning commission and board of adjustment.

The planning commission oversees new developments in the city and county, such as residences, businesses, new or expanding livestock operations, cell phone towers and advertising signs.

The board of adjustment considers exceptional circumstances and grant variances to the regulations if they agree it is best.

(This article was published in the April 16 print edition of the North Platte Bulletin.)