Speed and efficiency make your farm hum today. At the same time, you want to make sure your employees work in a safe environment, and you want to protect the environment where you live and farm. Premier Ag Cooperative, based in Seymour, Ind., followed the same blueprint when building its latest full-service retail branch near Boggstown in Shelby County.

“This facility was built for speed and efficiency,” explains Burke Admire, branch manager. “We needed to keep pace with the efficient farmers whom we serve. Plus, we needed more overall capacity compared to what we had before in this area.”

The new facility occupies a 17-acre footprint for the business on a site with 38 total acres. It replaces two branches, one at Franklin in Johnson County and one at St. Paul near the Shelby and Decatur county line. Both of those facilities were older, built for the way most farmers operated in the 1980s and 1990s.

For example, the new facility has 6,500 tons of holding capacity for dry fertilizer. That’s more than double the dry fertilizer storage capacity of the two branches it replaced, combined.

“The dry fertilizer building is built around a declining-weight machine that blends fertilizer without mixing,” Admire says. “There is no mixer. Yet we can program in whatever blend you need and prepare it accurately.”

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The system can handle up to five products, plus it has two microbins for micronutrients, such as sulfur, zinc and boron. If someone wants a dry fertilizer with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the co-op can put urea, phosphate and potash in the bins that feed the mixing belt and prepare the analysis.

Liquid products

The facility includes six 30,000-gallon tanks for liquid fertilizer plus 34,000 gallons of bulk chemical storage. The building is constructed with sloped and curved floors to serve as its own dike in case of spills or leaks.

There’s also a dry pond on the property, Admire notes, just in case. He explains that if necessary, they could contain everything stored on-site on the property.

“All of our loadouts for chemicals and fertilizer are under roof,” he says. “That’s a real plus compared to what we had at the older facilities.”

The building for liquid fertilizer and chemicals is also plumbed so the co-op can program what needs to go on a load through a computer and load it automatically. “One thing I’ve had to learn is trusting the technology,” Admire says. “We didn’t have this ability before, and it takes time to appreciate just what we can accomplish here.”

Basically, they can mix up an analysis to match whatever a customer wants if all the products are on hand, he says. They can make liquid row starter mixes, as well.  

Everywhere along the way, safety measures were built in to protect employees and minimize contact with chemicals and liquid fertilizer products. That matches up with the goal of sending out product quickly and efficiently, but taking no shortcuts on safety, Admire emphasizes.

The facility also includes bulk outside storage bins for seed and an indoor, state-of-the-art seed treating setup. If a customer wants seed treated with a certain product, the co-op can do it, all indoors.

The outside facility also includes storage for anhydrous ammonia and anhydrous ammonia equipment.

Check out the slideshow to see photos of the facility.