“They cost a huge amount of money to build, and while they can pump out two or three times the amount of feed per hour that a less automated plant can, they also need that level of business to actually pay for themselves and justify the cost. That means you need a LOT of dairy, beef, chicken, and swine farms packed into a very dense area, since that mill needs to be able to deliver to them. It also means a single giant point of failure if that operation breaks down for any reason. Suddenly, they’ve got a lot of hungry cows and nobody to step in and pick up the slack.
Ultimately, I think plants like the one my family runs will remain. A relatively simple operation that can service a majority of the farms in a hundred-mile radius, so that each delivery driver can comfortably make two runs in an eight-hour day. It’s hard for a giant plant to compete with that, because if you go too far out, the cost of delivery outpaces the potential savings from having a more automated operation. Especially when you’re looking at drivers doing overnight runs. That’s even more true when those smaller operations can source materials locally.”