Agris Co-operative, Thamesville, Ont., celebrated the official opening of its new fertilizer blending system on April 18. The capital investment for the project topped $2.5 million. Agris said it will increase the previous blending capability to 300 mt/h, four times faster than before.
This investment completes an overall strategy to increase capacity throughout the cooperative’s full trade territory. Over the past several years, Agris has brought its overall blending capacity to nearly 1,000 mt/h across its nine blending sites. Each site has the ability to add nitrogen stabilizer and micronutrient products in a liquid form to dry blends. Agris said this capability allows precise, cost-effective, and convenient plant nutrition in a high-quality fertilizer blend.
“This is about investing in our future by improving our capacity to meet our farmer-owners’ ever increasing requirement for speed, accuracy, and flexibility,” said John Nooyen, Agris Board President. “We have fundamentally changed our fertilizer blending capacity across our Agris locations and are now better able to meet the present and future needs of our owners and customers.”
“It is clear that we needed to be able to service more acres per day to ensure our owners and customers could plant their crop during a challenging spring,” added Jim Campbell, Agris General Manager. “As farmers continue to adapt their 4R Nutrient Stewardship practices, the need for flexibility and timeliness are amplified.
“We are now using the latest technology to seamlessly transfer information from the field to the plant and back to the field using our Advanced Information Systems. We are working hard to leverage new technology to maximize yields and profitability at the farm-gate across our whole cooperative system,” Cambell said.
Agris is a 100 percent farmer-owned grain marketing and farm input supply company that serves more than 1,000 farmer owners in 14 locations in Essex, Kent, Elgin, Middlesex, and Lambton Counties. It is a leader in precision farming technology, seed, agronomy and petroleum services.
The cooperative is a partner of Great Lakes Grain, a grain merchandising company. Agris is a member-owner of Growmark Inc., Bloomington, Ill., and markets products and services under the FS banner.