AgroLiquid’s Carrington, North Dakota facility supplies crop nutrition products to customers across the region. Led by site manager Jared Volk, this operation is continually adapting to the seasonal demands and increasing growth of the industry.
- Opened: 2015
- Acres: 12
- Staff: 3
Distribution and manufacturing
The main role of the Carrington facility is for distribution and small-scale, large volume manufacturing. This site serves a large territory, including customers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and parts of Minnesota and Montana.
“Our site is kind of unique,” said Volk. “We do a lot of material offloading. We can offload 11 rail cars at one time, and then we load out by truck. But we also do small-scale, large volume manufacturing, making two of our main products here – High NRG-N and Pro-Germinator.”
The Carrington facility has expanded rapidly. When Volk started in 2015, the site was only a half million gallon tank. They added the first building in 2017 and installed a two-million gallon tank in 2019. Today, the facility sits on 12 acres.
Efficient team
Three people run the entire facility. Working alongside Volk are Hunter Rindy and Marcus Kollman. Rindy has been at Carrington for five years, and Kollman has been there for three years.
“We’re all pretty versatile in what we do,” Volk said. “We all know each other’s job pretty well, and we can fill in for each other when needed.
Rindy primarily runs load out and organizes transportation, and Kollman manages manufacturing, railcars, and truck offloads. Volk plans, organizes, and manages, and helps with all jobs when it’s busy.
“The team is very versatile,” Volk said. “They can go from offloading rail cars to loading trucks to performing maintenance on a pump without missing a beat. They’re good workers, always coming up with new ideas, discussing solutions, and we really work well together as a team.”
The team members collaborate well in their group of three, plus they try to be as self-sufficient as possible.
“They always look for ways to improve and challenges to take on,” Volk said. “Both are mechanically gifted, so we do a lot of self-service maintenance and can figure a lot of things out before we have to hire out.”
Seasonal changes
Due to the weather and seasonality of fertilizer products, the facility does encounter some challenges.
“Winter can be really hard and can put some pressure on what we can do and when we can do it,” Volk said. “Our facility ships 5.5 million gallons of product annually, and 60% of that will go out in a 10-week period. When it hits, it’s all hands on deck.”
Depending on when the snow melts, the busiest time for the facility is from March to May or June.
“Both of the guys are great, so it takes a lot of pressure off me to guide everything,” Volk said. “I was by myself the first few years, and I helped set up a lot of things to be handled by one person. Two is better, and three is great. Everyone does a great job taking turns, especially when we have long days. Sometimes it feels like we don’t leave, but we know the push is short lived.”
Like all weather-related jobs, the team has to remain flexible when trying to plan.
“Living here, one of the challenges is you never know when winter is going to start or finish, so you make a plan with 15 contingencies just in case,” Volk said. “It’s always a little more difficult when there are blizzards, and you have to get railcars shoveled out in a short amount of time. North Dakota is actually a tropical paradise – don’t let the secret out. We try and hide that from everyone.”
The team consistently gets a lot of work done in a small amount of time.
“Overall, I’m really proud of both of them, the effort they put in, what we’ve been able to achieve, and the plant itself,” Volk said. ”When I first drove onto the site and it was only a half million gallon tank, to seeing it now – it’s a point of pride for me. I’m happy with where Carrington is today and how it has grown.”
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