A Trip To Our Fertilizer Supplier

On Tuesday we took a trip to our fertilizer supplier Masterblend International in Morris, IL.  The company moved into a new facility this spring and they hosted an open house yesterday for their customers to come and see the operation.  We buy nearly all of our fertilizer from this company each year.  They provide specific services that we find very useful.

The facility is over 52,000 square feet and houses their bulk storage, offices, mixing facilities, and bagging facilities.

This is their rail spur where they take delivery of their bulk fertilizer delivers.

The fertilizer is unloaded from the bottom of the rail cars onto conveyer belts into the building.  Two conveyer belts are used to avoid contamination of different fertilizers.

This is the bulk storage area of their building where they can store 4000 tons of fertilizer.

This is the part of the facility that we find very useful.  Masterblend has the ability to mix a specific fertilizer for our particular needs.  These black containers can each hold a different product that can be blended together.

The different fertilizer products are moved to a hopper at the top of this machine.  This machine can blend 2000 lbs of fertilizer in 2 minutes.  After the fertilizer is blended it is dropped down into either 50 lb bags, 2000 lb totes, or 1000 lb totes.

For the superintendents who read this, if you use UMAXX or UFLEXX it was bagged in this facility.

It was nice to see the facility and process that they use to blend the fertilizers we use.