Cattle stalwart Guymon going to the hogs

The news this week that the long time Chicago Mercantile Exchange live cattle futures delivery point at Guymon, Oklahoma is being eliminated speaks volumes about the changes in that once-robust corner of the cattle industry.

Home of the fabled Henry Hitch Ranch and some of the biggest feedlots in the industry that his son Ladd added, the cattle auction at Guymon has had kind of a checkered history, but was kept alive by the Hitch interests and being a delivery point for live cattle being tendered under futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

While probably more coincidental than a quid pro quo, the death of third generation Hitch scion Paul Hitch two weeks ago from cancer, probably hastens the massive species change that has overtaken Guymon.

Seaboard has built a huge pork slaughter plant in Guymon, leading to a major expansion in hog breeding and fattening in the greater Guymon area. The plant has recently been expanded, and a bio-diesel byproduct operation added. As a result, the Guymon auction has become much more a hog, than a cattle, auction, leading to the Merc move.

Paul Hitch had continued the family tradition of leadership in the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle cattle industry, as incoming president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA), a post he had to resign to devote full attention to fighting his cancer. (A Hitch son-in-law, Clark Willingham, was also a recent, influential NCBA president). Hitch had also led the way in founding Consolidated Beef Marketing, a coop of large and small panhandle feedlots that markets their cattle to packers as a group, restoring a great deal of leverage to cattle owners and feeders. All this activity kept Guymon on the map in the cattle industry.

In the sale barn's and area industry's heyday 10-12,000 head of cattle a week moved through the facility. Now a portion of the pens have been torn down and replaced with new confined hog buildings to receive and ship pigs. There are 10 other Merc cattle delivery points, the closest being Texhoma, 20 miles from Guymon.

Henry and Ladd Hitch must be turning over in their graves.