I grew up in a small town in a rural area. I was drawn to the bright lights of the big city, but plenty of childhood friends committed to staying there and raising their own families. Recently one of them asked me, with the mobility my job allows me and the crash course in remote employment the country has gotten this past year, would I move back?

I wouldn’t — at this point I’m a confirmed urban animal — but the question got me thinking about the long-term future of my home town and all the small communities across the country that make up the fabric of the republic. The next 100 years will refashion them far more than the last 100 did — and along with them, the meat industry.

A major meat plant is often a small community’s largest private employer. Small meat companies are treasured as a foundation of the community, offering relatively high paying jobs, sponsoring kids’ teams, and donating to nearly every local cause available. A growing percentage of the population doesn’t remember the industry being structured any other way. Elders, however, can recall the consolidation and migration of slaughterhouses and other processing plants away from urban areas and into the hills; it’s been just 50 years since the Union Stock Yards in Chicago closed.

So, the prospect of major relocation, economic disruption and rebuilding is closer at hand than most realize, or want to acknowledge. (We have evolved to be a generally risk-averse species.) It’s anybody’s guess exactly how the meat industry and the economies of small towns will change, but I’ll take a stab at it:

A changing climate will reshuffle the drivers of U.S. consumers’ behavior. While moving the processing plants closer to the farms and ranches drove major transportation costs out of the system and relieved a lot of the stress of moving the animal, consumers are giving climate considerations and the issue of transportation pollution greater weight in their decisions; the younger the consumer, the more important those factors are. That would be an argument for moving more processing, at least further processing, closer to consumers in metropolitan areas — which have grown consistently over the decades, especially in the suburbs, and now are home to 82.5% of the U.S. population, according to Statista.
The need for water will spur the relocation of processing plants to more renewable sources. Even a concerted in-plant conservation program can take the solution only so far. Call it back to the future: Industry will once again find it useful to be near rivers, specifically, from which they can take water and into which they can re-release it once it’s been treated. At least meat plants will have to find water sources other than the fragile aquifers that are being depleted at an alarming rate. Of course, technology could shuffle the deck again: An economical way to desalinize seawater or to create water out of its atomic components are the kinds of technologies, still largely experimental, that could change this part of the game once again.
Despite the promises of some meat substitute proponents, the North American meat industry will not be eliminated. Demand for meat products overall is growing even in the U.S. and certainly in developing countries; ceding some local market share to alt-meats won’t hurt much. This continent’s grain-fed, feedlot system is vilified by activists but is a big part of why livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gases is a fraction of what is produced in other countries. That, plus the fact that so much high quality meat product is made on these shores at rock-bottom prices, and the U.S. and Canada will continue to be major factors in providing animal protein to the world. And as positive as that projection is, it does put the domestic meat industry in a bind: How to produce the meat in demand, at a cost that will feed the world, and still address the water shortage and other environmental considerations will be top priority for companies in the 2020s and 2030s.

And the small towns? They have a once-in-a-century opportunity to reimagine themselves, to lay the groundwork for attracting newly nomadic tech and office workers, and consultants, to their communities. Already millions of workers have voted with their feet, leaving high costs and long commutes for outlying burgs and regular, but not daily, appearances at HQ. A century hence, the number of meat workers in these communities may be significantly reduced, but there still will be meat consumers.

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