Latest News

The lack of significant rainfall has slowed the rush of cattle that came to the largest employer here, a beef processing plant that employed 2,300 people in a town of 22,343. When the plant shut this month, it took with it an annual payroll of $55.5 million.

The closing has challenged families who had worked at the plant off Interstate 27 for generations. Sons and daughters stood alongside their fathers and mothers, husbands next to wives. Many are Mexican-Americans whose families have long called Texas home. They spent decades rising into the middle class on an average hourly pay of $14.27 and becoming highly skilled at the grisly process of turning slaughtered cattle into beef products, though many lacked high school diplomas. Their Spanish had a Texas twang, and they formed the blue-collar heart of a windswept town almost 50 miles from Lubbock.

Now those families have been fractured as some relatives stay in Plainview and others leave. Dozens of former plant workers have already moved, finding new jobs with the plant's owner, Cargill, or other companies outside Plainview or outside the state, many pulling their children out of the town's 12 public schools. When workers receive their last paychecks in three weeks, the question is whether they will stick around. And then, the more existential question, can the town survive without those who leave?

The drought — the third-worst in Texas since 1895 — has dried up pastures and increased the costs of hay and feed, forcing some ranchers to sell off their herds to reduce expenses.

Cargill executives said they were idling the plant and not permanently closing it, and it could reopen if the drought breaks and the cattle herd rebounds, a process that would take years.

Other towns and cities in Texas have been affected by the drought, including those limiting residential water usage. But none have been as hurt on such a widespread, and traumatic, scale as Plainview. Nine days after the plant closed on Feb. 1, a 16-year-old girl attempted suicide, after her mother, a former plant worker, told her they might move. The girl swallowed 34 sleeping pills because she did not want to leave her boyfriend, according to the police report.

One recent afternoon, Louis Torres, 52, pulled a U-Haul truck up to his house, where stacks of boxes crowded the porch and the living room. Mr. Torres was leaving the town where he had lived all his life, and he would be driving more than five hours to a new house and a new job at a Cargill plant in Dodge City, Kan.

In this one move, Plainview was losing 13 children and adults in the extended Torres family, including Mr. Torres, his wife, his 21-year-old daughter and his son-in-law, all of whom worked at Cargill and were offered jobs in Dodge City. His son, Jessie, 32, was staying behind: he worked at the plant, but he has not been called to Dodge City.

"I didn't want to leave my town, but there ain't nothing here for us," said Mr. Torres, a trainer who worked at the plant for 33 years. "God opened the door right there for me and said, 'Here, for all of your family, go.' "

Amid the bustle of the move, somebody asked if they could take the mailbox. Mr. Torres fought back tears, as did his youngest daughter, Julie, 11. She was wearing a purple tiara, a gift from her teacher on her last day of school. "They said goodbye and they gave me a ton of hugs," Julie said of her classmates.

In the two weeks following Cargill's announcement on Jan. 17 that the plant would close, about 20 students whose parents worked at the plant left the school district, a number that has steadily climbed since then.

Ronald Miller, the recently retired schools superintendent, said that nearly 1,000 of the district's 5,700 students had at least one parent at Cargill, and that if half of those 1,000 students left, the district would lose more than $2 million in state and local financing. He said closing a school or laying off teachers were options on the table.

"We don't know how long it's going to take for the full effect to kick in," said the mayor, Wendell Dunlap. "I think with 2,000 people laid off, there's no way that many people can find work around here. We're going to lose population. We're going to have businesses that are going to have a hard time making it."

A Cargill spokesman, Michael Martin, said 2,098 workers were laid off, in addition to more than 200 people who worked at the plant for other companies and agencies providing sanitation and other services. Of the Cargill employees, about 400 expressed an interest in relocating, Mr. Martin said.

Droughts, unlike hurricanes or tornadoes, are slow-motion disasters with indirect effects, and as a result some in town are skeptical it is to blame, believing other issues were involved. The weather itself has fueled disbelief: West Texas was hit with a winter storm that shut the Lubbock airport on Monday.

Mr. Martin said that the company idled the plant primarily because of the drought and the tight cattle supply. The day the plant closed, federal officials released new data showing the number of cattle in Texas at its lowest point since 1967.

"We would have preferred to have not had to idle any beef plant, but we cannot process cattle that do not exist," Mr. Martin said in a statement.

Plainview gets its name from the West Texas topography — flat, big-sky country surrounded by acres of cotton. It is a slow-paced town that cherishes its old-fashioned feel — its hometown hero is the sausage king Jimmy Dean — and its place in the top cattle-producing state in the country. Fiberglass statues of cattle peek out from the downtown rooftops and sidewalks.

The majority of the Cargill workers lived in Plainview, and many of them wore cowboy boots and drove pickup trucks, but it was not a man's world ("I was the first girl to start dropping heads in second shift," said one of Mr. Torres's daughters, Lynda, 26). Their ties to Plainview, and the plant, ran deep.

Cruz Castillo, 65, was laid off after working in maintenance at the plant for 42 years. He helped build the plant in 1971 when it was under different ownership, and he worries about finding new health insurance for his wife, who has diabetes. The day he lost his job, so did his son, his brother and two of his nephews. He will stay in Plainview, but he thinks his son might eventually move.

Every Saturday morning, a group of residents and laid-off workers gather outside the plant to walk four miles around the perimeter. They do it not as a protest, and not strictly for the exercise. They encircle the plant with prayers.

"It's going to have to be a miracle," said Manuel Balderas, a police captain who organizes the walks. "That's what we're praying for."