(Radio Iowa) – A southwest Iowa company has hired a Hartland, Wisconsin company to design its proposed 500-thousand square foot beef processing plant. Cattlemen’s Heritage lead developer, Chad Tentinger, says the plant will be built in northern Mills County just south of Council Bluffs. “A couple of things that will be different — from the front of it, it won’t look like a processing plant — it will look like an office building. Design is very important to us,” according to Tentinger. “It’ll also have state-of-the-art equipment in it. A lot of new equipment that maybe wasn’t available five years ago.”

E-S-I Group was chosen to design and construct the facility. He says a new plant like this hasn’t been built in a long time. “Certainly in the Midwest, it’s been decades. And what you see in plants is they use the existing footprint and figure out how to fit all the stuff into,” he says. “But we have the ability from a brand new facility to lay out how the equipment should look, how it should lay out, have this proper room, spread out, and then design the building around that.” He says the design process will take several months. He says they hope to have a final design this spring and begin construction and get the operation underway by the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024.

The plant is expected to employ 750 people, and Tentinger says there is a good workforce in the area. “We are going to start out with aggressive pay. The wages will be at the very high end of the wages for this field. We will also have onsite daycare, onsite banking, and some limited onsite medical,” Tentinger says. The plant is expected to process 15-hundred head of cattle each day. “Midwest beef that is primarily small family-farm raised — which is very important to us. So that we know the quality of the cattle, the quality of the caretaking, the source of the cattle — all that is very important to use down to the traceability — so that we know that anything that is coming through the plant is very high quality,” according to Tentinger.

The company says an estimated 33-hundred workers will be needed to construct the plant.