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LEXINGTON — “We’ve always been a silent business,” says Jason Fagot. “The average citizen doesn’t know what takes place here.”

Fagot, 35, is the general manager and spokesman for Nebraska By-Products of Lexington.

Nebraska By-Products is in the livestock rendering business. While the company may not be known to all, farmers, ranchers and feedlot operators certainly know about it.

Nebraska By-Products removes dead stock from farms and ranches and processes it. It’s a vital and important business to the livestock industry, but has importance to other businesses, too.

Fagot started with the company 16 years ago and is familiar with its operations.

“I started in the plant just like everybody else and worked from the ground floor up,”  he said,

The dead stock received is rendered into two products: tallow and rendered tankage that is processed into meat and bone meal for use in the animal feed industry.

One of the most important issues for a rendering facility is the promptness of retrieving the fallen animal. Deterioration leads to lower product value.

“In this global economic downturn, these issues are extremely important,” Fagot said.

 Nebraska By-Products serves customers within 200 miles of Lexington. It has 35 trucks and employs 150 people. It has re-load stations in Palisade and Dodge City, Kan.

Company President Lonnie Johnson “grew up in this business,” Fagot said. Johnson worked for an uncle in West Point and then with another rendering company in Missouri and Mason City, Iowa, before coming to Lexington in 1979.

At that time, Fagot said, Nebraska By-Products was a rendering plant that had three trucks and covered only the Lexington area.

In 1997, the company created its own red meat product bearing the Happy Hound label for greyhounds and farms in Kansas and Florida, then began expanding its distribution into Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona and Iowa.

“We’re recycling dead animals into useful products,” Fagot said. “We get the beef from farmers, ranchers and feedlots.”

Two years ago, Happy Hound dog food became available in Montana, Wyoming and Alaska for sled dogs. Some of the product is used by sled dogs that race in the Iditarod.

Canadian law prohibits shipping the dog food into Canada. It is shipped to Portland, Ore., then goes to Alaska by boat.

“This is not the kind of dog food a person would feed a family pet,” Fagot said. “It’s higher in fat for cold temperatures. It’s raw red meat, 100 percent beef. It’s more for energy than as a food source.”

Nebraska By-Products processes much the same as a slaughterhouse. “They work with live animals. We work with dead stock.”

Nebraska By-Products is subject to similar state and federal regulations as a packing plant.

Another byproduct is the hides. They’re removed from the animal and sold to tanneries in China, Vietnam, Mexico and Korea.

Rendering has gone on since early biblical times, he said. Modern rendering methods have been in use for well over 100 years.

“We are the original recyclers,”  Fagot said.

e-mail to:

betsy.friedrich@kearneyhub.com