employees and Cargill Meat Solutions, 2,700 employees. National Beef purchased a large Dodge City slaughterhouse in 1992. Cargill began operations in Dodge City in 1979 and its plant eventually reached a capacity of slaughtering and processing 6,000 cattle per day. National Beef also owns and operates a slaughterhouse and beef packing plant in Liberal with a capacity of processing 6,000 cattle per day and employing about 3,500 people. That number of employees comprises about one-third of the total employed work force in Seward County where Liberal is located. By the mid-1990s, the meat-packing industry in the Golden Triangle was slaughtering 23,500 cattle daily. As the ConAgra plant in Garden City burned down in 2000, the 21st century capacity is somewhat lower. Population The three counties with large meat packing plants are among the four counties in Kansas with a majority Hispanic population. Grant, the fourth county with a majority of Hispanics, is also in southwest Kansas, but has several vegetable processing plants rather than a large packing plant. The employees at the meat-packing plants in these three counties comprise about two-thirds of the total employees of meat-packing plants in Kansas. The majority of workers at meat-packing plants are foreign-born Hispanics. Nationally, 66.8 percent of meat-packing employees are Hispanic and 56 percent of all workers are foreign-born. By contrast with the heavily Hispanic and foreign-born population of the Golden Triangle counties, Hispanics make up only 13.02 percent of the total population of Kansas. Sources: Labor While the establishment of a large meat-packing industry in southwest Kansas was facilitated by the abundance of water, animal feed, feedlots, and local governments offering incentives to investors, there was no similar abundance of labor in the small cities and towns of the region. Unemployment was low; the population was largely non-Hispanic white; and most Anglos were not interested in the hard and dangerous work associated with a meat-packing plant. As one commentator said, “Your Anglo community is not going to work there, pretty much regardless of the wage. The entire meatpacking industry depends on immigrant labor, and always has.” In the 1980s, IPB recruited workers from far and wide for its Garden City plant, including 2,000 former refugees from Southeast Asia, mostly Vietnamese. In the 1990s, IBP opened an office in Mexico City to recruit Mexican and Central American workers. By 2000, Hispanics comprised 77 percent of IPB's work force in Garden City. In 2006,