Drought Fells a Texas Town’s Biggest Employer

PLAINVIEW, Tex. — After two years of drought, people are starting to leave this parched West Texas town.

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.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 1, 2013

An article on Thursday about the effects of a drought on businesses and families in Plainview, Tex., using information from Cargill, misstated the annual payroll of the beef-processing plant it closed there. It was $55.5 million, not $15.5 million.

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