THIS IS?ONE of the cavernous storage bins in NEW?Cooperative’s new fertilizer load-out facility in Roelyn. A family stands at the entrance during the elevator’s Aug. 25 open house. The fertilizer pictured is monoammonium phosphate, or MAP.

ROELYN – Like proud parents the managers and staff of NEW?Cooperative’s facility in Roelyn showed off their new fertilizer loadout facility Aug. 25 during an open house at the end of the work day.

Visitors, mostly area residents, former employees, and families of co-op workers and farmer members, toured the new 50,000-ton storage facility that was completed just days earlier.

They could also browse through the company’s new liquid fertilizer facility completed last year.

Dan Dix, NEW Cooperative’s general manager, said the facility will service the fertilizer needs of its member-owners in a 50-mile radius, which includes supplying two satellite storage facilities – in Rowan and Cooper – with product.

He said he hoped visitors left that day understanding that “NEW is investing for the long haul into farming.”

TERRY?PANBECKER, left, a MAPS manager, explains how the Soilmap software system will help applicators in the field meet farmers’ needs for fertilizer applications.

The new building stores 13 different types of dry fertilizer in 18 storage bins ranging from 14,000 tons to a few thousand tons in size.

Dix said this makes the Roelyn site the largest fertilizer storage and handling facility in NEW Cooperative’s entire 36-community operation, which boasts seven fertilizer plants.

The company can unload a 110-car unit train in 14 hours and has the capacity to load out upward to 700 tons of product in an hour.

“But if it wasn’t for the loyalty and support of our members,”?Dix said, “none of this could have happened.”

The entire facility is run through computer sensors, using Kahler software – being fed orders from NEW’s proprietary Soilmap software – and blend and load out product, then send application details to the applicators in the field.

DAN DIX, general manager, talks about the new fertilizer load out facility to visitors at the Aug. 25 open house. He said this is the largest fertilizer facility in NEW’s operation. Last week, he said, NEW unloaded its first-ever 110-car unit train of potash sourced from Canada. The process took 14 hours.

This fall, Dix said, new dispatching software will be patched into the system and will oversee the movement of all of NEW’s equipment fleet.

Dix said the facility will allow NEW to store more than a dozen fertilizer products for local dealers, which can become a local source of product if NEW needs to purchase some or all of it.