A new facility will allow a local company to increase its production capacity.
The Neosho-headquartered Moark Midwest Division started out in its feed mill near the airport about 45 years ago. When they decided to expand, they looked at updating the existing structure, but there was not quite enough room.
A new $8 million facility, just down the road in Neosho’s Industrial Park, will open before the end of May.
The new building will have 16.8 million pounds of silo storage dedicated to corn and another 16 bins inside the mill will hold 1.7 million pounds of other raw materials, like soybean meal or flaxseed.
Inside, 20 load-out bins provide mixing stations for several different types of feed for layers of different ages and nutritional needs.
“We have over 200 formulas,” said plant manager Jerry Welch. “At any given time we’re probably making from 15 to 20 at a time.”
Currently, workers have to schedule bins for specific feed production, and each bin has to be cleaned when they change feed types. The new facility will make things run smoother.
“It’s like a pull-through garage,” Welch said. “The bins are overhead and they load from the top.”
Two side-by-side rail spurs coming off the Kansas City Southern Railway line will be able to hold up to 10 cars apiece. The company has no rail capacity now and hopes to reduce long-haul trucking on ingredients not readily available in the area. Corn trucks will continue to roll in. The old Neosho mill will be used for corn storage and the bulk of the material for the layer feed they produce comes from area farms. That’s one thing that will not change, Welch said.
“We buy the majority of our two main ingredients – corn and soybeans – we buy the majority of that right here in this area,” Welch said, “from here to Nevada, Mo.”
Most of what they make ships to farms in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
With the new plant, they will be able to unload 420,000-pounds-per-hour and operations will be automated, run by a central computer system making things run faster and more efficiently.
Right now when an operator goes to mix feed they measure out ingredients, eyeballing the scale and manually shutting off the flow when they get the amount of corn or other ingredients they need.
“The computer will do all that,” Welch said. “We’ll probably see an increase in our margin.”
The computerized system can mix a million pounds of feed in an eight-hour shift and it will produce less waste than the current system. An average day’s production is 650,000 pounds.
Current facilities include a leased mill near Carthage and the Neosho location. The combined capacity for both older mills was 85,000-pounds-per-hour. The Carthage location will close when the new Neosho facility opens. Workers have already started training on the new equipment.
