The Iowa Transportation Commission awarded the small northwest Iowa city of Boyden a grant of nearly $285,000 today for street improvements to property for a new business.
Boyden Mayor Tim Lammers talked to the commission about the project. “Our community has been blessed with a kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We’re a little town of 700 people — a total tax base of about 32 million — and we have a feed company/elevator that is looking to spend 15 million dollars in our community,” Lammers says.
He says the new FCS feed mill will replace one in town and be in a better location and increase its capacity. “With the increased flow — we are currently doing about 700 tons a day — this will be about upwards of three-thousand ton,” Lammers explains. “So we are looking at about one hundred semi loads of feed being produced each day.” Lammer says the new mill will help areas farmers. “It’ll enhance the corn prices in the local area and it should by estimates bring about an extra million dollars of income to local growers. Because of our location being up in the northwest corner we’re about 30 miles from Minnesota and about 30 miles from South Dakota. So, we have the ability to export some of this extra feed to Minnesota and South Dakota.”
Lammers says the new mill will bring in at least 20 new good-paying jobs. “The average estimate from FCS is in that 47 to 49-thousand dollars a year range. And they are sustainable jobs,” Lammers says. “They are actually investing also in the pork production. They are building about 50-thousand pig spaces themselves — so they are actually providing the feed for their own buildings that they’ll be contracting to local growers.”
Lammers told the Transportation Commission the 20 new jobs is a conservative estimate, and the company thinks it could eventually have as many as 40 new jobs