A&B Welding Develops Efficient Liquid Fertilizer Facility For Heritage Cooperative

Matt Hopkins Posted by Matt Hopkins|July 8, 2014

Heritage Cooperative needed an efficient fertilizer plant. And with help from A&B Welding, that’s exactly what the company got.

The new liquid fertilizer facility for Heritage Cooperative at Kenton, OH, has the ability to load out both fertilizer and crop protection chemicals. The facility is a unique design which A&B Welding has developed over many years of constructing liquid load out facilities. The building is a new design using energy panels for the main construction to allow the building to be very energy efficient. The facility has two bays which can load out fertilizer mixes as well as hot load chemicals directly into the mix. Small additions are measured into the blends via a weigh pot. Chemicals can also be dispensed via pistol grips located in the bay as well as into cage tanks via a repack station. One load out bay also has the ability to operate unstaffed during off hours so fertilizer can be picked up literally 24 hours per day.

The 32% can be loaded into the new double wall 2-million gallon tank via a 10 car rail header or using a truck unload station. The other fertilizers and chemicals are brought into five 30,000-gallon fiberglass tanks and eight 10,000-gallon 316 tanks, via a separate load in pad on the west side of the building. The products are piped independently to make sure there is no cross contamination. A pipe rack with walkway/stairs allows the operator to easily access the chemical tanks and keeps all of the piping up and out of the way.

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The fertilizer bays have the ability to move product at a rate of 600 gallon per minute into each of the two load out bays using either top or bottom fill options. With staging the trucks and signing the tickets, this translates into an average of eight to 10 25-ton loads per hour. All of the products are metered so using NTEP approved devices which means you can skip the truck scale on the way out. The facility is automated using Kahler’s latest recipe based software which allows the entire plant to be operated from a single touchscreen.

For more information. visit www.ABWeldingMfg.com.

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Hopkins is Senior Online Editor for the CropLife Media Group at Meister Media Worldwide. See all author stories here.

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