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Building For TheFuture (from CropLife magazine Feb 2008)

For the past two years, Lange­Stegmann has been busily expanding and upgrading its facility to capture this vision. With the assistance of Waconia Manufacturing, Inc. (which provided the fertilizer blending and handling equipment) and Marcus Construction Co. (which worked on the warehouse facility it­self), Lange-Stegmann's new St. Louis Urea Center includes 63,000 tons of storage capacity in 15 bins, with eight bins dedicated for urea only.

For train distribution, the facility consists of23,000 feet of track with three company-owned locomotives on-site to handle the unit trains as their come into the facility. With these upgrades, the Lange-Stegmann operation is now capable of loading 360 tons per hour, or 8,000 tons per day. "The railroad companies have made it clear that they want to drive their trains onto your property without break­ing them into pieces, drive their locomotive away, have the facility take the cars, unload them, clean them, and put them back into position to be picked up inside of 24 hours," says Stegmann. "With our new upgrades in place, we can now easily accomplish this, no matter how large the unit train happens to be."

Besides its rail capacity, the Lange-Stegmann facility has also upgraded its barge operations as well. According to Stegmann, upgrades to the river terminal include replacing the current dock, improving the overhead conveyor system, and the installation of a product conditioner to ensure high quality product off the barges. "With these improvements, we can now unload four barges per day, or 6,000 tons per 24­hour period," he says.

On the production side, Lange-Stegmann will soon open a 125,000-ton granulation plant on its property - the first such operation to be built in the U.S. in "decades," says Stegmann. "Primarily our concept here at the facility is bring in urea, take it off the railcar or barge, and put it into storage until it's time to ship," he says. "But we do have some customers that want their urea upgraded. That's where our granulation plant comes into play."

Above: A construction worker coordinates the placement of a portion of the new blending tower to be installed at the Lange­Stegmann warehouse. When completed later this year, the new expansion will be able to accommodate 63,000 tons of fertilizer in 15 bins, with eight bins dedicated for urea only.

In this case, the urea is moved from the warehouse to the granulation plant for what Stegmann calls "phase modification." Through this process, the urea is melted using heat, turning it into urea liquor. Once liquid, the company adds Agrotain's ingredients to the product and re-granulates it using a falling curtain process.
"This creates very round and uniform granulars, making for a great finished product," says Stegmann. In another part of the plant, Lange-Stegmann can make sized urea for its customers.

With these upgrades in place, Lange-Stegmann's facility will move an additional 300,000 tons of fertilizer through it's operations during the first year. "Our goal is to get that figure up to around an additional 600,000 tons of fertilizer eventually, in one form or another," says Stegmann. Beyond that, he adds, Lange-Stegmann will remain true to the principles that the company was founded upon - provid­ing the best possible products to customers in a timely fashion. "The trend towards efficiency in transportation is here to stay in the fertilizer market," says Stegmann. "We are now in the unique position to do this, and change as the industry demands us to change as well. Ten years from now, I still expect our company to be leading the way for this marketplace, no matter what the distribution requirements are."