Watonwan Farm Service, a farmer-owned cooperative in Minnesota serving more than 4,000 producers in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, provided grain marketing services, fertilizer, crop chemicals, seed livestock feed, petroleum products, and production financing. Without train capacity WFS was not able to connect to the growing grain markets of Asia; East Asia is the major source of demand for corn and soybean exports and would boost the economic outlook for this low-income community.
NMTCs financed the construction of a new high-speed working grain shuttle house and rail terminal facility, with a concrete slip form elevator with two grain dumping pits, 20,000 bushel-per hour legs, a 10,000 bushel-per-hour dryer, and a 70,000 bushel-per-hour unit train load-out station. A loop track was developed along State Highway 109 east of Delavan, two 1.33 million-bushel steel bins, and four hopper-bottom bins each with the capacity to hold 220,000 bushels of grain with adjacent flat storage to hold up to 2.88 million bushels of harvest excess grain.