Jake oldenburg, VP operations
I want to talk about a few of the projects NuWay-K&H Cooperative has worked on over the summer and which are now complete.
In the spring of 2023, we tore down the Ormsby dry fertilizer plant and entered into a voluntary agreement with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to clean up the site. There was a big pile of dirt sitting there for some time. That soil has been taken away, and the cleanup is now complete.
At the same time, we rebuilt the anhydrous ammonia (NH3) plant at Ormsby. One of the tanks was deemed unsafe and the other two were old and small. We removed those tanks and installed two new 30,000-gallon NH3 storage tanks, increasing our storage at Ormsby by 6,000 gallons—about one truckload of NH3.
At the Ormsby NH3 plant, we also installed a new riser, which is where we fill nurse tanks for transport to the field. Since we deliver these tanks quite a distance—north of St. James and west to the Bergen area—we needed to reduce loading time. So we did some things to increase the efficiency of the loading process. Now, we can load nurse tanks at Ormsby in half the time it takes to load them at our Welcome Operations facility.
In the near future, we will look at Dunnell and Welcome to see if we can reduce loading times there, as well.
We’ve also added a third 90,000-gallon propane storage tank to our rail unloading facility at Welcome. This new tank will be useable during the 2023-24 winter heating season. We added this tank to bolster our ability to take rail cars of propane, mostly from Canada, and redistribute the product to other locations. The new tank will give us the ability to unload more cars and use that facility to a greater extent.
While there wasn’t a lot of corn drying this fall, we were still able to unload 55 railcars during September and October, at the height of the corn drying season. We will bring product in by rail throughout the winter.
So, we’ve made significant investments in both agronomy and energy with the projects at Ormsby and Welcome.
Knowledgeable employees benefit you
We probably talk more about our investments in equipment and facilities in this newsletter than we do our investment in people. However, we are committed to making sure we maintain an educated group of employees who will be able to answer questions about the products they are delivering to the country.
In the past, we’ve made sure our employees understand about the diesel fuel, the seed and the seed treatments we sell. However, we want to do more to help our employees be knowledgeable.
That’s because we believe we can benefit our customers by adequately training and adding value to our employees. We’ll be using the agronomy off-season (the winter) to provide our employees with even more educational opportunities.
