Built as the country's largest Greenfield flour milling facility, VAA was hired by Cenex Harvest States (CHS) to provide Owner's Representative services and portions of the design on a design/build basis of the new plant.

The design was for a 22,000 hundred weight (cwt) mill, half for bread flour and half for semolina. The Semolina was produced from durum wheat, supplied by farmer producers who own CHS and shipped by unit trains. The facility has a large 1,000,000 bushel raw product storage elevator and a flour mill with three operating process lines. Also included were areas for packaging, palletizing bag products, bulk load out for trucks and rail cars and efficient fluidized loading of flour and semolina into trucks and rail cars.

The site was formerly a large new car distribution site. It provided several civil challenges, which our team successful dealt with including being located on a flood plain with both wetlands and ground contamination. Two railroads, Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific were located on the site. Our civil rail team designed a loop track at one end to link the two railroads together in order to purchase, sell and ship unit trains on either of the rail lines. This provided significant flexibility in terms of logistics.

The very fast-tracked project with completion scheduled for 17 months, included design permitting and construction. The contractor for the grain facility was Todd & Sargent. The main milling building complex contractor was T.E. Ibberson. They also acted as senior contractor on site and hosted job site meetings providing coordination services. We delivered the project using 14 additional separate prime contracts through the construction phase of the project.

Due to the tight schedule, beginning late in the year, a recommendation was made to utilize a very stiff mat foundation of six feet thick reinforced concrete mat on one end and a four feet thick concrete mat on the other end. This was done through a continuous pour of concrete and cages of reinforcement with approximately 3,500 cubic yards of  concrete being poured in a two day period of time. This cost was similar to pile supported pilings, however, it met the schedule challenge.

Three production lines were put in and space was provided for a fourth specialty line, which has since been added. CHS has since joined with Cargill to create Horizon Milling. This facility remains a top notch mill in terms of efficiency, modernization, cleanliness and safety.

The success of the project led the team to continue to work together on future projects with CHS and to build a long term working relationship.