Dreyfus' Twin Bins Built to Hold Beans
Published: Friday, March 6, 2020
The two enormous structures rise up from the southern Kosciusko County countryside looking like they were meant for some otherworldly purpose.
A scientific research station in Antarctica?
Blimp hangars on the moon?
A new Colts practice facility?
As it turns out, the towering Quonset hut-style buildings under construction at the Louis Dreyfus Co. soybean processing plant on the corner of S.R. 15 South and 700 South in Claypool are exactly where they're needed.
Tommy Mullin, who lives in the neighborhood separated from Dreyfus by a railroad track and a small stand of hardwoods, can see them from his front yard.
"As long as they bring business in, it's all good, know what I mean?" he said last Friday. "I do farm painting so I'm around things like that all the time. As long as it supports farmers, I'm all for it. A lot of people work over there, I know that."
For the time being, only one of the buildings has a distinctive white, flexible roof trimmed in royal blue; the other is still mostly a steel skeleton evocative of urban architecture.
When they're finished in time for the 2020 harvest, the buildings will be able to hold 120,000 acres worth of soybeans, Dreyfus commercial manager Jeremy Mullins (no relation to Tommy Mullin) said after doing some quick math on his cell phone.
Until then, the buildings spanning the length of three football fields laid endzone to endzone to endzone will remain the objects of passerby curiosity.
"Mostly what we're getting is, 'What in the world is that?'" Mullins said. "We're always building stuff people don't even see so they don't ask about it, or it looks like everything else, but this is unique to us. We knew when we built it up here right by the highway people would notice it.
"It's not a normal grain bin by any means—it's so big and being covered in white makes it stand out."
The Quonsets will double the capacity of Dreyfus' already imposing, though more conventional-looking, concrete storage buildings at what is the nation's largest integrated soybean crush plant and biodiesel fuel facility. Similar storage facilities around the country have demonstrated that bigger should indeed be better for Dreyfus.
"Everything we do in this business is based on scale," Mullins said. "It's all about cost per bushel, so the bigger you do things the less it costs per bushel. That's the way we look at things and this is a way for us to ensure that we can always be open at harvest and be able to take our farmers' beans when they need to move them.
"It's also going to allow us to dump trucks faster. We're putting in two additional truck pits so our capacity for both storage and unloading is going to increase significantly. Theoretically, we should never have a line (of trucks) again."
Practically speaking, Mullins expects trucks may still be queued up at peak delivery times, but the goal is to get them back to the farms as quickly as possible.
"During harvest there are times when we'd get full, and we don't like that," he said. "For farmers, time is of the essence, especially at harvest. (Going forward) we should never have more than one line based on all the engineers' expert advice. This doesn't change our production amount; this changes the storage amount to ensure (continuous) production."
Most of Dreyfus' soybeans go to feed, about 20 percent is used in biofuel production and some are used to make glycerin. After considerable research, it was determined the Quonset design is the most cost-effective, Mullins said, and the plant had a patch of land that turned out to be ideally suited for the project.
"We didn't think it would fit there at first," he added.
The Quonsets were supposed to be completed in time for last fall's harvest, but like everything else in agriculture last year, construction was delayed by wet conditions.
Each building's sea of beans, or what Dreyfus farmer origination specialist Ryan Martin called "one big covered pile," will be deep enough to swallow up the construction trucks currently on site.
"The concrete walls only go up so high, so the (outside of the) beans won't go above them," Martin said. "But the center of the pile could be pretty doggone high."
Said Mullins, "It's hard to comprehend, even for us. We look at it from the standpoint of customer service to allow trucks to move faster, and to ensure that a supply of soybeans is always here for times of the year when the weather's bad and beans aren't able to move, or when prices are low—like they are now—and farmers aren't interested in selling."
A conveyor will transport the beans from the bins to the crush plant.
The Claypool plant has had one of the region's slower dump capabilities according to Martin.
"This will dramatically change that," he said. "At harvest especially, look, guys need to get crop out of the field and dumped, and get back to the field. That's the key part of this with the extra dumps and the ability to move trucks through faster. We should be able to increase the turn-time for farmers, which increases their efficiency for getting through harvest."
For now, the twin bins are referred to informally by the decidedly unglamorous names of Barn 1 and Barn 2.
True to his Purdue University education, Mullins joked that maybe they should be called Mackey Arena.
Never mind that the home of Boilermaker basketball would easily fit inside of the ground covered by the Quonset.
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