The Feasibility Study Consultant's Role in Meat Processing Feasibility Studies

In 2021 the problem was that there was not enough slaughter capacity. In 2026 Tyson, JBS and Cargill are closing and idling beef plants because there are not enough cattle — while USDA simultaneously commits hundreds of millions of dollars to expanding small processing capacity. Both things are happening at once, and a feasibility study still built on the bottleneck thesis is describing a market that no longer exists.

The inversion

The Tyson closure states the case better than any statistic. University of Nebraska–Lincoln economists Elliott Dennis and T. Jake Smith described the Lexington, Nebraska plant in December 2025: "The Lexington plant employs roughly 3,200 people and can slaughter almost 5,000 cattle per day, approximately 4.8% of total daily U.S. beef slaughter." That is roughly 20% of Tyson's own daily capacity of about 25,800 head. It closed in early 2026.

Tyson also cut a shift at Amarillo. Texas A&M's David Anderson estimated the Lexington closure plus the Amarillo shift would "reduce beef-processing capacity nationwide by 7-9%."

And it was not isolated. JBS closed its Swift Beef value-added plant in Riverside, California on 2 February 2026, affecting 374 jobs, and announced mid-2026 closures of a beef plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania and a value-added facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Cargill idled its Fort Morgan, Colorado plant — roughly 1,700 workers and about 5% of US beef production. A three-week strike at JBS Greeley, Colorado, involving roughly 3,800 to 4,000 workers, was resolved by a ratified contract in April 2026.

Fed-plant utilisation ran in the mid-60s to low-70s percent range through summer 2026 — 66% in one week, 70.3% in another — against the 90%-plus that characterises a healthy large-plant operation. Cow-plant utilisation ran near 49% to 51%.

Meanwhile USDA is spending. MPPEP has awarded 74 grants totalling more than $325 million since 2022, Phase 4 put another $60 million into the market, and the new SPUR programme committed up to $500 million to independent beef processors.

For a consultant the implication is direct. The market case cannot rest on a national capacity shortage, because at the fed-cattle end there is now a capacity surplus. It has to rest on something specific and local: producer access, geography, species, service, or a supply shed that is genuinely underserved.

What the supply data actually says

USDA NASS's Cattle report of 24 July 2026 put all cattle and calves at 94.2 million head as of 1 July 2026, up 200,000 from 94.0 million a year earlier — the first July increase since 2018.

But the composition is what matters:

• Beef cows: 28.5 million, down 1%. The American Farm Bureau notes this is "the smallest July inventory on record," with the data series going back to 1973.
• All cows and heifers that have calved: 38.1 million, unchanged.
• Beef replacement heifers: 3.80 million, up 3% — the first meaningful retention signal in nearly a decade.
• 2026 calf crop: 32.5 million head, down 2% — the smallest on record and the ninth consecutive annual decline.
• Feeder cattle supply outside feedlots: 33.6 million head, the smallest since 1996.

The retention signal is real and it is modest. At 1 January 2026 there were only 4.7 million beef replacement heifers nationwide — the second-lowest since the 1940s, behind 2025's 4.6 million, per Hannah Baker at University of Florida Extension. Beef cow slaughter fell nearly 17% in the first half of 2026 after an 18% decline in 2025, which is how retention shows up in the data.

Rabobank's projection is the useful frame for a five-year model: a beef cow inventory of roughly 28 million at 1 January 2026, up 200,000; a second increase of under 500,000 head the following year; meaningful growth only from 1 January 2027 into the early 2030s — and a projected peak still 500,000 to 1,000,000 head below the 2019 highs.

Heifers were 37.4% of cattle on feed at 1 July 2026, down from 38.7% in January. Cautious retention, not aggressive rebuilding.

One structural detail worth carrying into any throughput model: cattle on feed totalled 13.2 million head at 1 July 2026, up 2%, despite a shrinking herd — because carcass weights are heavier and days on feed longer. Steer carcass weights reached 963 pounds in the week of 4 July 2026, roughly 30 pounds above 2025 and 47 pounds above 2024. More pounds are coming from fewer animals, which matters if the plant is paid per head rather than per pound.

Production is falling regardless. USDA ERS forecast 2026 beef production at 25.288 billion pounds, down roughly 2.8% from 2025's 26.003 billion, and 2027 at 25.200 billion. Roughly 46% of the cattle inventory sat under at least moderate drought against 16% a year earlier.

Packers are losing money at record cattle prices

This is the single most important economic fact for anyone modelling an own-and-sell plant.

Fed cattle traded at records through 2026. The 5-Area steer moved from $232 to $247 per hundredweight between January and February, and per Sterling Marketing's Beef Profit Tracker reached a record $263.42 per hundredweight in the week ending 23 May 2026.

The Choice cutout stayed roughly flat while cattle climbed. The Choice packer spread compressed from about $0.40 per pound of carcass weight at the end of Q1 2026 to about $0.16 by the end of June.

Estimated packer margins that week: a loss of $347.20 per head, worsening from a $298.27 loss the week before. Other mid-2026 weeks ran roughly negative $291 to negative $311 per head.

Feedlot margins over the same period were strongly positive — around $435 per head in one week. The value moved up the chain to the cattle owner and away from the processor.

Tyson projected a fiscal 2026 beef segment loss of $350 million to $600 million after a $426 million loss in fiscal 2025. Retail beef reached a record national all-fresh average of $9.64 per pound in April 2026, up about 13% year over year.

The consequence for feasibility work: a plant that buys the animal is buying it at a record price into a flat cutout. A plant that never takes title is not.

Which business model — and why the answer has changed

Custom and toll processing. The plant charges a fee to harvest, cut and package animals owned by someone else. Revenue is fee income. No commodity price exposure and no inventory risk — the customer owns the animal throughout. The business is capacity utilisation multiplied by fee.

Own-and-sell. The plant buys livestock, processes it and sells product. Revenue is the spread between livestock cost and product value — and that spread has compressed from roughly $0.40 to $0.16 per pound of carcass weight in a single quarter. It also requires substantial working capital to carry inventory at record cattle prices.

Hybrid. Most small and mid-sized plants run both, and the mix determines the risk profile entirely.

The recommendation that follows from the 2026 data is specific: in supply-constrained, high-cattle-price regions — which is most of the country right now — the custom and toll model is structurally safer, and a feasibility study should say so rather than treating the two as interchangeable.

What would change that. If the buy-sell spread widens back above roughly $0.30 per pound of carcass weight and cattle prices ease as the herd rebuilds, own-and-sell becomes more defensible. Watch the January 2027 NASS report for accelerating heifer retention — that is the leading indicator.

Either way, the model must show each stream separately with its own volume, pricing and cost assumptions, and state plainly which one carries the coverage. A projection blending fee income and product margin into one revenue line has concealed the primary risk.

Inspection status determines the addressable market

Custom-exempt. Processes animals for their owners' personal use. Product cannot be sold. Lowest regulatory burden, narrowest market.

State inspection. 29 states operate a State Meat and Poultry Inspection programme, required to be "at least equal to" FSIS. Product may generally be sold within that state.

Federal inspection under FSIS. Interstate and, subject to eligibility, export. Federal inspection is provided at no charge for the first shift — the costs are indirect: facility design, HACCP validation, testing and labelling. Overtime and holiday inspection is billed to the plant, which is a real and frequently omitted cost line for a small plant running irregular hours.

Cooperative Interstate Shipment. Authorised in the 2008 Farm Bill and launched in 2012, CIS lets qualifying state-inspected establishments ship interstate under the USDA mark. Georgia became the eleventh participating state on 27 July 2026, joining Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin. FSIS reimburses states 60% of CIS inspection costs. No state currently holds a supplemental export agreement.

Inspection status determines addressable market, which determines revenue. A projection assuming retail or restaurant sales from a custom-exempt facility is not optimistic — it is impossible.

Two 2025 and 2026 regulatory developments worth knowing:

FSIS withdrew the proposed Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products — originally published at 89 FR 64678 on 7 August 2024 — effective 25 April 2025 at 90 FR 17344, after 7,089 comments, many from small processors arguing the receiving-step threshold would be unworkable at their scale.

The "Product of USA" labelling rule reached its compliance date on 1 January 2026. Finalised in March 2024, it restricts the claim to animals born, raised, slaughtered and processed in the United States. FSIS reissued Directive 7221.1 in December 2025. For a plant marketing on origin, this is now a live compliance obligation rather than a marketing choice.

Humane handling enforcement retains zero tolerance for egregious violations, with immediate suspension. The Animal Welfare Institute's 2025 update reports rising suspension activity in state programmes, though that is advocacy-compiled FOIA data rather than a primary FSIS statistic.

The supply shed is the market analysis

For most asset classes market analysis means customers. Here it means animals, and it runs in both directions.

Upstream: where do the animals come from

The convention in credible extension work is a 100-mile haul radius. The University of Tennessee's Smith County study and the Upper Mississippi study in Monona, Iowa both used 100 miles; the North Coast California study used two concentric county tiers.

And there is a scale effect worth knowing. Research published in Agricultural Economics in 2022 found that economies of scale in animal assembly expand the effective radius where local slaughter and processing fees are high — meaning a plant with a cost advantage can draw from further out than a naive radius suggests. The same supply-shed logic governs any rural agricultural infrastructure asset whose throughput depends on local production, from a processing plant to a grain elevator.

The analysis requires:

• Cattle, hog, sheep and goat inventory by county within the haul radius, from NASS and state data
• Producer counts, herd sizes and current processing arrangements
• Competing processor capacity within the shed — including newly grant-funded plants, which should be assumed to compete for the same animals
• Seasonality of availability
• Whether producers are genuinely supply-constrained on processing access today

The backlog question, answered honestly

The 2021 to 2022 booking backlog was real. Texas A&M documented harvest bookings running into 2021 during the pandemic disruption.

It has softened in most regions by 2025 and 2026.

A credible study now documents current booking lead times rather than citing the pandemic-era backlog, and treats 2021 to 2022 as an anomaly rather than a baseline. "Build it and they will book" is no longer a safe assumption, and a lender who financed a plant on that thesis in 2022 knows it.

Producer commitment

Lenders increasingly require signed producer letters of intent or commitment covering a meaningful share of projected throughput, and MPPEP requires committed project financing.

Producer surveys are standard practice for estimating willingness to supply — the University of Minnesota halal processing study and the North Dakota lamb study are useful models.

Where producer commitment cannot be documented, the demand case is an assertion.

Downstream: where does the product go

For custom work the customer is the livestock owner. For own-and-sell it is retail, restaurant, institutional, direct-to-consumer or wholesale — each with different pricing, volume and payment characteristics.

Throughput, capacity and the viability floor

FSIS classifies establishments by employee count: very small at fewer than 10 employees or under $2.5 million in annual sales; small at 10 to 499; large at 500 or more.

The viability floor is well established in extension work. The University of Tennessee modelled a small federally inspected cattle plant at 36 animals a week across 50 weeks — 1,800 head a year — showing revenue of roughly $418 to $518 per processed animal for custom harvest and pre-tax profit around $80,000 at that volume.

The Hudson Valley study found feasibility at roughly 1,500 steers plus 2,500 other animals, and at about half that volume with grant assistance.

So the practical floor for a small federally inspected cattle plant without grant support sits around 1,500 to 1,800 head a year. Below that, the fixed costs of an inspection-ready facility, refrigeration and skilled labour overwhelm revenue.

For scale contrast, a Big Four beef plant runs around 5,000 head a day.

Harvest and fabrication are separate constraints

This is the most common technical error in the sector. A plant can be limited by kill floor capacity or by fabrication capacity independently, and the two do not scale together.

And cooler, freezer and hanging rail space must scale with both. The Agricultural Utilization Research Institute's Upper Midwest work identified onsite cold storage as a frequent binding constraint and recommended expanding federal grant eligibility to cover cold storage upgrades.

A facility with ample kill floor capacity but insufficient cooler space cannot convert throughput into revenue. Carcass hanging time is not compressible.

Current fee levels

USDA's Q2 2026 grass-fed report put processing fees paid to the processor at $0.94 per pound hanging weight and the slaughter fee at $125.00 per head.

Direct-market operators quote higher. Cut-and-wrap runs roughly $0.90 to $1.40 per pound hanging weight with slaughter and kill fees of about $100 to $350 per head depending on carcass size. Malco's Buxton Meats' 2026 schedule illustrates the structure: beef kill from $170 under 800 pounds up to $350 over 1,200 pounds, cut-and-wrap at $1.40 per pound; hog kill $110 to $160. Regional ranges run roughly $0.75 to $2.00 per pound hanging weight, with bulk sausage seasoning around $1.75 per pound.

By-products cut differently by scale

Drop credits — hide, offal, fat — are meaningful revenue for larger plants. Sterling reported drop credits around $230.82 per head in a mid-2026 week.

Small plants frequently pay for rendering and disposal rather than earning from it, and the by-product market has weakened as hide values and export demand softened. A small-plant model that books by-product revenue has the sign wrong.

Value-added

Sausage, cured products, portion cutting and retail packs carry higher margins than base processing service. Foodservice portion-option menus rose 21% to 27% between 2024 and 2025 per Tastewise, which supports the demand case for portion cutting.

But value-added requires additional cold storage, additional skilled labour, additional regulatory scope and a market that has to be won. It should carry its own build and its own risk in the model rather than appearing as a margin uplift.

Labour is a supply risk, not just a cost line

The skilled pool is shrinking. Employment of butchers and meat processing workers fell to 188,000 in 2025 from 204,000 in 2024 and 231,000 in 2023, per BLS Current Population Survey data via FRED. Industry pay generally runs from the high $30,000s to around $50,000 depending on role and geography.

And immigration enforcement is now a documented supply risk. ICE roughly doubled its workforce to more than 22,000 officers by January 2026, funded by the July 2025 reconciliation law, and conducted at least 40 worksite actions with more than 1,100 arrests in the administration's first seven months — including a meatpacking raid in Omaha with at least 76 arrests.

Research from CU Boulder and Brookings found that enforcement surges shrank the available workforce and cut employment among remaining immigrants by roughly 4% through a chilling effect, with an estimated 668,000 jobs lost across US cities.

For a plant dependent on an immigrant workforce — which describes most of the sector — this is a genuine feasibility risk that belongs in the study rather than in a footnote.

The training pipeline is thin. Community college programmes exist — Central Lakes and Ridgewater in Minnesota among them — but capacity is small relative to demand. Automation adoption is rising and generally pencils only at scale; very small plants remain dependent on manual skilled labour.

A study should document the local skilled-butcher pipeline explicitly, and name the dependency where the plan rests on one or two experienced individuals.

Cost structure and the constraint that kills projects

Construction cost, current 2026 figures: USDA-inspected meat and poultry facilities run $480 to $850 per square foot for conventional hygienic design, against $250 to $420 for FDA-only facilities. The USDA premium is 25% to 40%, or roughly $80 to $220 per square foot.

Metal-building turnkey small plants are quoted far lower at $35 to $85 per square foot, but those quotes typically exclude the full kill floor and refrigeration fit-out — which is the expensive part.

A small USDA-inspected plant typically requires 4,000 to 6,000 square feet; a cut-and-wrap-only operation can work in around 2,400.

HVAC and refrigeration alone drive 25% to 45% of total construction cost.

Scale reference from actual awards: Riverbend Meats in Idaho Falls received $25 million to double capacity from 300 to 600 head a day. Rocky Mountain Prime received $5.24 million. Natural State Processing, in poultry, received $3.78 million. America's Heartland Packing in Warren County, Missouri applied a $10 million grant toward an 800-head-a-day plant targeting 2,400. Typical Local MCap and MPPEP Phase 2 grants ran $250,000 to $3.8 million.

Wastewater

This is repeatedly the deal-breaker and it should be priced before anything else.

High biochemical oxygen demand and nutrient loading, permitting, and capital for pretreatment can exceed the processing equipment budget at a rural site without municipal capacity.

A feasibility study that identifies a site and models a facility without an engineering estimate for effluent handling has left the largest single cost risk unquantified.

Working capital

Own-and-sell plants need substantial working capital to carry live animal inventory at record cattle prices. Custom plants need far less — which is another point in favour of the toll model in current conditions.

The grant and loan landscape

MPPEP

74 awards totalling more than $325 million since 2022. The final ARPA-funded round awarded $35 million to 15 processors on 19 September 2024.

Phase 4 made $60 million available, split between a very small and small processor competition and an intermediate processor competition, with applications open from 7 May to 7 August 2026. It required cattle as the primary species processed. Grants cap at no more than $25 million or 20% of project cost and require committed project financing. A Phase 3 Round 2 was anticipated in spring or summer 2026.

Aggregate MPPEP claims to date: more than 800,000 cattle, 14,000 hogs, 23 million chickens and 5 million turkeys of added annual capacity, roughly 900 additional producers served and more than 1,200 jobs.

SPUR — new, and explicitly defensive

Announced 30 June 2026. Per the USDA release, Secretary Brooke L. Rollins announced "up to $500 million in payments to eligible entities," authorised under the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act and administered by the Farm Service Agency.

It pays federally inspected beef processors — including Talmadge-Aiken and CIS establishments — that are US-owned and not "nationally dominant," defined as holding market share at or above the fourth-largest packer, to offset high cattle acquisition costs.

It is temporary and defensive rather than expansionary. Meat Institute chief executive Julie Anna Potts put it plainly: it "will not increase the cattle supply."

As of early August 2026 USDA had not published the payment formula or begun payments. A study that models SPUR revenue before the formula exists is modelling an assumption.

The rest of the federal stack

Meat and Poultry Intermediary Lending Program. USDA's consolidated figure is $167 million awarded to 15 eligible lenders across 12 states, with individual awards of $2 million to $15 million. Examples include Oyate CDC at $15 million, Rural Development Finance Corp at $10 million, and Farmers Union Foundation at $834,000. Note that figures vary by source — an earlier FY2023 release cited $186 million across 24 projects, and the first round was $75 million to 8 lenders.

Local Meat Capacity grants. FY2024 awarded 97 grants totalling $55.8 million — 42 in March, 33 in July and 26 in October 2024. Processing Expansion Projects ran $100,000 to $5 million; Simplified Equipment-Only $10,000 to $250,000. No FY2025 request for applications had been issued.

Meat and Poultry Inspection Readiness Grants, the seed programme, awarded 111 grants totalling $21.9 million in FY2022.

Food Supply Chain Guaranteed Loan Program. Launched December 2021, it guaranteed more than $250 million including four meat and poultry projects above $75 million, at up to $40 million per borrower with a 90% guarantee on qualifying fixed-rate loans. It was cancelled in May 2023 under the Fiscal Responsibility Act and was never replaced. Any study still citing it as an available route is out of date.

USDA B&I

The workhorse, and the backbone of most rural processing deals.

Under the OneRD regulation at 7 CFR Part 5001, effective 1 October 2020, B&I guarantees up to 80% of loans up to $25 million, and up to $40 million for rural cooperatives undertaking value-added processing, for businesses in communities of 50,000 or fewer. Loan amounts run $200,000 to $25 million.

Fees: a 3% initial guarantee fee and a 0.5% annual retention fee. Lenders must retain at least 7.5% of the loan on the unguaranteed side.

FY2025 saw a record $3.5 billion appropriated, at a federal cost of roughly $438 per job created, though Rural Development staffing was reduced.

What USDA requires in the study

The classic Rural Development five-part format: economic, market, technical, financial and management feasibility. MPPEP additionally requires committed project financing.

Free help exists and is underused. USDA's Meat and Poultry Processing Technical Assistance programme offers no-cost support, and the Flower Hill Institute maintains a directory of feasibility and grant-writing providers.

SBA

A data limitation worth stating. Animal slaughtering and processing falls under NAICS 311611, 311612, 311613 and 311615, and SBA does not publish a clean loan count or dollar table at these six-digit codes. Loan-level disclosure is available through SBA's datasets and third-party aggregators. For scale, SBA approved 70,242 7(a) loans worth $31.1 billion across all industries in FY2024.

Food manufacturing generally charges off at a lower rate than accommodation and food service, but a study should cite the specific NAICS vintage and measurement basis rather than a generic headline figure.

SOP 50 10 8, effective 1 June 2025, reinstated a mandatory 10% equity injection for startups and complete changes of ownership, with seller notes counting only on full standby for the life of the loan and capped at 50% of the injection. The 7(a) small loan threshold dropped from $500,000 to $350,000, the minimum SBSS score rose from 155 to 165, and tax transcript verification and hazard and life insurance requirements were restored.

One item specific to this sector: manufacturers under NAICS 31 to 33 may also use the MARC loan, added as Appendix 13 to SOP 50 10 8.

Where meat processing projects fail

Named failures exist and they matter. Marfa Meats in west Texas opened in summer 2021 and closed in January 2023. Investigate Midwest reported in 2023 that small plants were struggling to survive even with roughly $1 billion in federal grants available, burdened by higher per-unit operating costs than the Big Four.

Grant funding is not the same as viability. Several plants from the 2021 to 2024 wave have failed or underperformed, and capacity added on paper does not equal capacity operating at projected utilisation.

Grant timing is itself a risk. Some 2021 to 2024 grantees faced payment freezes in early 2025, which the American Association of Meat Processors warned "could drive a small processor out of business."

The common projection errors:

• Extrapolating the 2021 to 2022 booking backlog into current demand
• Conflating harvest and fabrication capacity
• Understating wastewater and cold storage cost
• Assuming a rapid ramp to high utilisation — new-plant pro formas assuming 80%-plus quickly are a recurring failure point
• For own-and-sell, underestimating live animal cost and working capital in a record-price environment
• Booking by-product revenue at small-plant scale
• Ignoring newly grant-funded competitors in the same supply shed

What a lender is reading for

Are the animals there? Documented supply shed inventory on a defensible haul radius, current processing arrangements, and competing capacity including newly funded plants. This is the first question and frequently the deciding one.

Which business model, and does the model reflect it? Fee-for-service, own-and-sell, or a mix — with each stream separate and the coverage attributed correctly.

What inspection status, and does the revenue model match it?

Is producer commitment documented? Signed letters of intent for a meaningful share of throughput.

At what utilisation does it cover? Stated as a number, against realistic sustained throughput rather than nameplate, with the 1,500 to 1,800 head floor in mind for a small federally inspected cattle plant.

Has wastewater been engineered and priced?

Who does the work, and what happens if they leave? Including the local pipeline and any workforce exposure.

Is grant revenue treated as capital rather than as operating income? And is SPUR excluded until the payment formula exists?

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Cattle report, 24 July 2026, and Cattle on Feed data.
• American Farm Bureau Federation analysis of NASS July 2026 inventory.
• USDA Economic Research Service, Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Outlook, LDP-M-385, 16 July 2026.
• Sterling Marketing Beef Profit Tracker, 2026 weekly packer and feedlot margin estimates.
• Dennis, E. and Smith, T.J., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 12 December 2025.
• Anderson, D., Texas A&M University, beef processing capacity analysis.
• Rabobank beef herd rebuilding projections; Baker, H., University of Florida Extension.
• USDA Rural Development — Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program Phase 4; Meat and Poultry Intermediary Lending Program; Local Meat Capacity grants; Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program; 7 CFR Part 5001.
• USDA press release, 30 June 2026, Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers programme.
• USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service — Cooperative Interstate Shipping Program; Salmonella Framework withdrawal, 90 FR 17344, 25 April 2025; Product of USA labelling rule and Directive 7221.1.
• USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Q2 2026 grass-fed beef report.
• University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, feasibility of a federally inspected custom livestock processing facility.
• Hudson Valley Livestock Marketing Task Force meat processing facility study.
• Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network multispecies facility feasibility work.
• Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, Upper Midwest processing capacity analysis.
• SBA Standard Operating Procedure 50 10 8, effective 1 June 2025, including Appendix 13.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey via FRED; Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
• University of Colorado Boulder and Brookings Institution research on immigration enforcement and labour supply.
• Investigate Midwest reporting on small processor viability, 2023; American Association of Meat Processors.
• CoBank Knowledge Exchange, broiler production outlook, 16 January 2026.

Prepared by feasibility-study-consultant.com. Livestock inventory, price and margin data move weekly; figures reflect published sources at the date below. SBA does not publish loan or charge-off data at the six-digit NAICS level for animal slaughtering and processing, and no sector-specific default rate is asserted here. Construction cost ranges and custom processing fee schedules draw partly from contractor and individual processor sources and are indicative rather than project estimates. SPUR payment terms had not been published as of early August 2026. Screwworm-related import status, MPPEP Phase 4 awards and grant programme rounds were all evolving at the time of writing and should be verified against current USDA notices. Programme terms are set by SBA and USDA and are periodically revised; confirm current requirements with the participating lender. This is not legal, tax or lending advice. Last updated: August 6, 2026.