Heartland Cooperative Invests $27M in Iowa Grain Facility

After a year of construction and an investment of $27 million, Heartland Cooperative’s grain elevator and storage facility in Fairfield, Iowa has officially shipped its first truckload of grain.

The first shipment of 448,000 bushels of corn was loaded onto a 112-car train headed for Swanson, California to be used for livestock feed by cattle operations and dairies in the San Joaquin Valley.

With the use of a newly added 10,000-foot rail loop, the facility will be mainly shipping grain west and south to California, Texas, and Mexico on the Burlington Northern-Southwest main line.

The new facility has 4.4 million bushels of grain storage across eight steel bins and two concrete towers. It also boasts two dump pits for unloading, bringing off-loading time down to five minutes.

The Heartland Cooperative site began accepting grain deliveries in July of this year. Before this time, farmers in southeast and east central Iowa had no previously existing local option of a facility with rail access where they can sell their grain.

More on this story