All Posts from August 31, 2016

Growmark plans new Canadian facility

Growmark said Aug. 31 that it plans to build a new state-of-the-art fertilizer facility in Ayr, Ont. It will be managed by FS Partners. The 15,000 mt facility will have nine bins to give flexibility for retail blending needs. It will also have a blending system capable of mixing up to 2,000 mt of crop nutrient products per day, more than doubling the old capacity of 800 mt per day. The facility will be capable of receiving products by rail and truck.

Construction is expected to start in October, with completion in about a year. The new plant is a shared asset between Growmark and FS Partners, with FS utilizing it to serve its farmer-customers, while Growmark will use it to it to distribute to area retailers.

PotashCorp completes $90 M Hammond project

Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. officials were on hand today in Hammond, Ind., for the grand opening of the $90 million rail facility and warehouse at the Hammond Regional Distribution Center. This structure can hold more than 100,000 tons of potash and with this capacity, PotashCorp says the distribution center is like having a mini mine in the Midwest.

“It improves our ability to efficiently deliver potash to our U.S. market,” says Bob Felgenhauer, PotashCorp’s vice president of transportation and distribution. “Building this facility shows our customers we are committed to meeting their needs and are willing to invest in facilities to do that.”

The warehouse, completed in April 2016, is equipped with state-of-the-art product-handling equipment that can unload railcars two to three times faster than a typical potash warehouse. This helps handle increased capacity from PotashCorp’s Saskatchewan mines, which recently saw multi-billion dollar expansions.

The first phase of the Hammond project, which added 14 miles of track to the rail yard, was completed in 2012. This created space for up to 1,000 railcars to stand loaded and ready to roll. In bypassing potential bottlenecks at the busy Chicago rail corridor 25 miles to the north, PotashCorp said it can forward position material and significantly reduce delivery times to customers.