Marcus Construction

What They Needed

North Prairie Ag was looking to expand its fertilizer blending capacity company-wide with locations in six communities. The company’s needs included both being able to receive unit trains of fertilizer and then blending with precision and high-speed.

What We Designed

Marcus Construction designed a 24,000-ton fertilizer blending facility with high-speed receiving from both rail and truck. The receiving tunnel, at 224 feet, houses a 1,200-ton per hour receiving conveyor. The building is designed for future expansion and includes high-speed state of the art blending capacity from Sackett-Waconia.

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There were several obstacles with North Prairie Ag’s site. The first was making a plan to work with their existing site layout as the new 224-foot receiving tunnel needed to go directly under the grain operations main receiving and shipping road. We needed to make sure that throughout construction we wouldn’t disrupt their business operations of receiving grain at the elevator.

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To keep North Prairie Ag operational, we coordinated with Josh and his team to close half of the road and then we excavated and built half of the receiving tunnel. When that part was finished, we did the same thing on the other side of the road.

Another challenge was getting the 12-foot deep rail pit excavation done safely without disrupting the live rail traffic on the adjacent track. The rail pit had to have an engineered sheet pile system installed to maintain a safe excavation while keeping rail traffic on the adjacent track moving.

All of these challenges were successfully accomplished with great coordination between North Prairie Ag and Marcus Construction personnel.

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