After several years of planning and construction, Platinum Crush, LLC has begun operations west of our office in Storm Lake, Iowa. With this new processing facility comes another outlet for the soybeans we produce in Northwest Iowa. Our hope is this new outlet will provide our local soybean market with the same type of opportunities as the ethanol industry provided to the corn market 15 years ago.
The entire Stalcup Ag Service staff was able to tour this facility before going online late this spring.
We were shown the process of how a bushel (60 pounds) of soybeans grown in Iowa is turned into approximately 11.5 pounds of soybean oil and 44 pounds of soybean meal. Soybean meal is used as feed in livestock production. Soybean oil is shipped out via rail car to another facility for numerous other uses. Some of the uses are food production and paint. The most recent developing market for soybean oil is producing renewable diesel fuel. This newsletter had an article last summer devoted to the different types of diesel fuel, how they are produced, and their uses. Renewable diesel produced from soybeans is a direct and complete replacement for petroleum derived diesel fuel and does not require any blending.
This makes processing soybeans a new method to produce a cleaner transportation fuel and also gives the American farmer a new market for their homegrown product instead of relying on exporting to foreign nations.
Here are a few interesting statistics we learned during our tour:
- 5,000,000 bushels of soybean storage capacity on site
- 60,000 bushels per hour of unloading capacity. (60 semi-trucks per hour)
- 1,200 bushel unloading pits. (Can hold an entire semi-truck load)
- Plan to unload 600 semi-trucks per day during harvest season
- Will process 120,000 bushels of soybeans per day
- 42 million bushels processed annually
To put the 42-million-bushel amount in perspective; Buena Vista County (where the plant is located) produced 8,768,000 bushels of soybeans in 2023 according to the USDA’s National Ag Statistics Service. This facility needs every soybean grown in Buena Vista County and 4 other similar sized counties just to operate. Obviously, they will not receive every soybean grown in Buena Vista and surrounding counties, so the reach of this new facility will be very widespread and hopefully have a positive impact to the soybean market in Northwest Iowa.
