Aerial view of NEW Cooperative’s river terminal at Blencoe, IA, with 1,400 linear feet of docks for barges along the Missouri River and a 20,000-ton fertilizer storage building. Photo courtesy of NEW Cooperative
Barges have been loaded and unloaded by various companies and individual farmers since the 1930s at a spot on the Missouri River at mile marker 680.5, about 3-1/2 miles due west from the town of Blencoe, IA and a little more than 40 miles downriver from Sioux City, IA. However, no barges have stopped there since the early 2000s.
Sioux City is as far upstream as you can take a barge. A few miles upstream from there is the Gavin Point Dam.
The geography proved attractive for Fort Dodge, IA-based NEW Cooperative, which operates a roughly 5-million-bushel grain elevator in Blencoe. In addition, an exit from Interstate 29 for Blencoe is 3.8 miles from the barge-loading site.
These factors helped persuade NEW Cooperative to purchase the 34-acre site from a private owner in 2019. Over the next two years, the cooperative developed a floating dock in the river capable of housing six barges at once and a receiving operation primarily for fertilizer that includes a 20,000-ton storage building.
The Blencoe site is the cooperative’s only barge-loading and unloading facility. It’s also the farthest upstream grain-loader on the Missouri.
“NEW Cooperative has 10 locations along the I-29 corridor,” says Frank Huseman, operations manager for the cooperative. “Our members grow a lot of soybeans in that area. This new location is really our on-ramp to world commerce, and it’s more environmentally sound to load and unload barges at Blencoe than to truck product from the Mississippi River to our facilities. Producers also use a lot of fertilizer in the area, so this is a good location to off-load fertilizer.”
River depth sometimes can be a concern this far upstream on the Missouri, but since barges have begun to be loaded again since April 2021 the river level has been good.
“There are a few shoaling areas in the 150 miles from Blencoe down to Kansas City (MO),” Huseman says, “but overall, the channel has been in good shape.
“In 2019, the river ranged from 1,031 to 1,036 feet (above sea level),” he continues. “This year, it’s a little lower, at 1,020 feet, mainly due to reduced discharges from Gavin Point and reduced runoff from drought conditions in the Upper Midwest. The Army Corps of Engineers predicts a normal eight-month navigation season on the Missouri. So far, we’ve been able to bring in and ship 9-foot-draft barges.”
Operations at Blencoe are under the direction of Ben Bears who has a crew of six workers.
While NEW Cooperative did a lot of the work on improving the site in-house, B&E Construction Inc., Eagle Grove, IA (515-448-5344), assisted with various portions of the project.
NEW Cooperative installed a 1,400-foot-long fleeting area along the riverbank, enough length to spot six barges. Huseman says a floating dock was preferred over a fixed dock because the relatively strong current along that stretch of river could cause the riverbed to degrade over time.
At this point, there is no grain storage on-site. To load barges, the cooperative purchased a used inclined open belt conveyor from a coal mining company in Illinois. The conveyor has a maximum capacity of 20,000 bph. The conveyor is loaded from trucks through a portable receiving pit.
The conveyor empties onto a Thor Global oscillating telestacker, which can swivel so that barges are not required to move to be loaded.
As of late September, according to Huseman, the Blencoe facility has unloaded 40 barges of fertilizer and aggregate and shipped about 20 with soybeans, corn, soybean meal, and distillers dried grains destined for export terminals at the Gulf.
Most of the products unloaded at Blencoe are various types of fertilizer, much of which is sourced from suppliers who deliver to barges on the Lower Mississippi River.
When they arrive at Blencoe, the barges are unloaded at 800-tph with a Thor Global open belt conveyor. The conveyor currently is used to load trucks or carry fertilizer products into the new fertilizer storage building.
In addition to fertilizer, the unload conveyor also can be used to receive aggregates and other building-type materials, which can be piled on the ground outside the fertilizer building.
NEW Cooperative hired Greenfield Contractors LLC, Clermont, IA (833-385-1859), to construct the fertilizer building. It has a capacity of 20,000 tons in four open bins for different products.
According to Huseman, the building is 170 feet wide by 340 feet long by 70 feet tall with a flat concrete floor. An overhead hot galvanized stainless steel frame is covered with a Calhoun Fabric polyethylene material guaranteed to hold up for 20 years.
The fabric is attached to a 3-foot-tall concrete stem wall. According to Huseman, part of the purpose of the wall is to protect the building contents from river flooding on the Missouri, though that stretch of the river has not reached that high in recent memory.
The structure also includes an 800-tph Sackett-Waconia overhead tripper belt conveyor to deliver product to the proper bin.
Since the barge facility went into operation in the spring, Huseman estimates that Blencoe’s handle has been about 70% fertilizer and 30% grain and grain products.
Next in line at Blencoe: The cooperative is in discussions with the State of Iowa and Monona County to have the gravel roads paved from I-29 to the facility property.
Ed Zdrojewski, editor