George, Iowa — The skyline of George will soon change. Officials with Cooperative Farmers Elevator, or CFE, tell us their facility in downtown George will change, and a new, large facility is being built south of town.
CFE’s CEO, Rob Jacobs explains.
(as said) “As we look at the George location and at how it sits today and in the future… the board of directors and staff employees… to best serve our patrons there in the future… We’ve got some aging facilities that sit right in the middle of the city there that have outlived their useful life… some safety concerns associated with the annex that’s there today that will be coming down. It’s a cement structure that’s got some issues. So we’re going to demolish the old annex downtown and also a couple of steel bins and a leg there.”
Jacobs says they considered rebuilding on-site, but it became obvious that they should probably go a different way.
(as said) “A lot of things were taken into account… you know logistics in and out of the facility, noise, dust, traffic, and the safety aspect of trucks and tractors and lots of activity in the city versus outside the city… We really felt it was best to move operations when you’re spending that kind of money and looking at the future for CFE and our customers.”
The new site is a mile south of George at the corner of L14 and A46 — the Ashton blacktop. He says they’ll still use most of the property downtown.
(as said) “After the current demolition is done there’ll still be some storage that’s left downtown. We plan on using that internally as a company for the time being and then looking at future plans and what to do with the remaining bins and cement structure. There will be parts of what we own that… so for instance our large steel flat there will be transitioned into… Our lumber yard needs additional storage space. And so that will transition to the lumber division and then offices will still be used for the time being. Our grain division operates out of there. The headquarters for that is there. We’ll be selling off a couple buildings that we’ve had interest in. But we’ll just see what the time brings here.”
He tells us how big of a project the new facility will be.
(as said) “Yeah we’re making a pretty good significant investment. We’ve got 1.75 million bushels of steel upright storage, about 35 thousand bushels an hour of handling capacity, 7,000 bushel-an-hour dryer going in there, office and scale, so you can imagine it’s a pretty good-sized investment that we’ll be making south of town there.”
He says work is underway on the new site.
(as said) “We’re actually moving dirt as we speak here. But we hope to be pouring the receiving pit early next week closer to that… and started work on bin foundations… We’ll see scales and office work beginning very soon — as soon as the roads out to those parts of the facility are completed. To be honest with you our goal is to be operational by fall. A lot of that depends on whether obviously. But we know a lot of things need to go right for that to happen. “
Jacobs says they’ll continue to accept grain and do business as usual at the old location until they can switch over to the new facility.
