Idaho Falls packing plant suddenly closes and 150 people lose their jobs
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IDAHO FALLS – American Farmers Network, a 66,000-square-foot beef and bison processing plant formerly known as Intermountain Packing at 1096 East Iona Road in Idaho Falls, suddenly closed its doors last week.
EastIdahoNews.com has received numerous emails about the closure since Friday. Details about the closure are unclear, but a federal notice issued under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act confirms 150 employees were laid off.
The Act requires large employers to provide at least 60 days’ advance notice of major layoffs or plant closures. The listing through the Idaho Department of Labor, which was updated on Monday, indicates Intermountain Packing filed the notice on Friday.
A former employee, who wished to remain anonymous, tells EastIdahoNews.com he and the rest of the employees were called into a meeting with human resources on Friday morning. He says they received a letter referencing ongoing challenges receiving and processing cattle, and the company was closing its doors immediately.
“We were struggling to get cattle in,” the employee says. “It was going really good until December, but then it started declining. It got to the point where we were just harvesting one day a week, and we started losing a lot of people.”
The employee mentioned speculation about legal issues with the company, but said he did not know anything about it.
History of problems
Intermountain Packing opened its doors in 2022. At the time, the general manager told EastIdahoNews.com the plant had the capacity to process up to 500 head of livestock a day.
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Two years later, the company was charged with a misdemeanor for public nuisance after numerous complaints of a foul odor emanating from the facility.
Court records alleged that Intermountain Packing “allow(ed) a pungent odor that is offensive to the senses and which interfered with a considerable number of persons and/or an entire community or neighborhood’s comfortable enjoyment of life and/or property to be emitted from the facility.”
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture filed a complaint against Intermountain Packing and CEO David Adams in December 2024 for alleged violations of the Packers and Stockyard Act. An investigation revealed that between September and December 2023, the company failed to pay for 2,884 head of livestock totaling over $3.8 million.
Last May, Intermountain Packing was acquired by American Farmers Network, a Bellevue, Washington-based grass-fed beef supplier, and Sanin Mirvic became the company’s new CEO.
EastIdahoNews.com contacted the USDA on Tuesday to see if the agency was involved in the closure or if there are any active investigations regarding American Farmers Network. Our inquiries have not been returned.
We visited the facility on Tuesday, but the gate surrounding the property was locked.