Closing of NKC flour mill reflects shift of work to coasts

Oct 20, 2011 at 08:45 AM CST
The Kansas City area, once a national center for grinding wheat into flour and home to dozens of mills, has but two left. Three, if you count Excelsior Springs. The recent shuttering of the Archer Daniels Midland mill in North Kansas City marked another milestone in a generations-long trend. It has been sped by changing rules for railroads and ever more sophisticated logistics for transforming wheat into flour into food. Those changes have gradually but steadily shifted much of America's bread business out of the country's breadbasket. Modern economics and mechanics dictate that we feed our bakeries with fewer and larger mills and that we move them closer to where people live. That means shifting the age-old process of grinding grain, separating hull from kernel and bran from germ, closer to America's coastlines. In turn, that has steadily shuttered mills in the country's lightly populated, and heavily farmed, midsection. "It's cheaper to ship and then mill rather than the other way around," said Josh Sosland, the editor of Milling & Baking News in Kansas City. "It's that simple." For much of the 20th century, government regulations bundled the cost of shipping grain to the mill with the expense of delivering the resulting flour to the bakery. But federal deregulation of the railroads in 1980 put the industry on track toward shipping rates that made more sense for millers. So the story of 21st-century flour-making has become a reminder of how critical milelong trains are to the bread on your sandwich, the cake of your Twinkie or the crust on your large pepperoni with extra cheese. "Bakeries need to be close to where people are" so goods can cheaply be delivered fresh, said Mark Fowler, the associate director of the International Grains Program at Kansas State University. "The mills have been moving closer to the customer." First and foremost, the shift has been toward consolidation. In 1900, when the U.S. population was 76 million, the country was home to more than 13,000 flour mills, and Minneapolis was seen as the milling capital. Today, in a country of 310 million people, the number of mills is below 170 and falling. And now the 8.2 million pounds of flour ground from wheat in Los Angeles every day is by far the most in the country. Modern methods aim to keep momentum-killing, energy-wasting train stops to a minimum. So shippers tend to load up 100-car loads -- with cars capable of toting up to 110 tons of wheat each -- at grain elevators and haul that grain to a mill geared to a similar scale. Increasingly, those mills sit at the edge of urban areas where there's room for such huge trains to sidle up. The ADM mill in North Kansas City, by contrast, sits east of the junction of Interstate 29 and Armour Road. That's the middle, not the outskirts, of the Kansas City area's metropolitan sprawl. The area's remaining mills -- one operated by General Mills in Kansas City's East Bottoms area and another run by Cereal Food Processors in Kansas City, Kan. -- are all that's left from the dozens once situated here. That the North Kansas City plant operated as long as it did is a reflection of how glacial the transition to larger, exurb-based, coastal milling has taken. The investments in existing infrastructure are too substantial to simply toss away functioning plants. In fact, ADM didn't just walk away from the mill. Rather, city officials pressed it to sell to make way for a mixed-use retail development. North Kansas City paid $11.25 million for the facility and took possession Oct. 3. Now the city is seeking bids on demolition, a process likely to stretch into the spring. ADM says it doesn't know when the plant was built, but the grain giant bought it from Commander Larabee Corp. in 1929. It was the site of an explosion and fire -- not uncommon to grain storage facilities -- that knocked out its western side in 1979. Two people were injured in that incident. At its peak, the North Kansas City plant employed as many as 100 workers. It was retooled over the years and had 60 people on the payroll nearing the time of its close this fall, when it could crank out 2 million pounds of flour a day. Part of the shift toward larger mills has been driven by technology. Surely, making flour still means reducing a kernel of wheat to a fine powder. But the mechanical details of that have gotten ever more sophisticated. In particular, the grinding machines have been engineered to withstand higher volumes -- more tons per hour. Through the years, though, the job had always been much the same. "You clean the grain, temper it, grind it and sift it, grind it and sift it, and grind it and sift it some more," said Dan Wells, who once oversaw the plant. "Then you reduce all of the flour down to the bran." Compared to other mills built since the North Kansas City facility with its skyscraping elevators, this one was hamstrung by surrounding urban development that limited its space for parking rail cars. An ADM spokeswoman responded to questions about the company's decision to close the plant with an email. "We determined that closing this facility would allow us to improve the overall efficiency of our operations by shifting production to facilities with available capacity," she wrote. In some ways, the closing of plants like the one in North Kansas City began in the 1960s when truckers and, especially, barge operators began competing for wheat-hauling business. Their lower prices gradually began to push down rail shipping rates, a trend that accelerated with deregulation. "The railroads were forced to respond," said Michael Babcock, a transportation economist at K-State. "Suddenly, the rates for wheat were half what they were for flour." So even though 4 tons of wheat typically produces about 3 tons of flour, it was cheaper to move the grain rather than the powder. Once flour is produced from a mill, it's usually "fluidized" -- air is pumped into it so that it can flow like water into a tanker truck to be hauled to a bakery. "In the old days you'd put it into 50-pound bags and hand-load it into a truck," said Jim Bair, a spokesman for the North American Millers Association. "Today you've got to be more efficient to make the economics work." To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send email to [email protected]. Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/19/3217930/closing-of-nkc-flour-mill-reflects.html#ixzz1bKyfd3pR

Oct 20, 2011 at 08:45 AM CST

The Kansas City area, once a national center for grinding wheat into flour and home to dozens of mills, has but two left. Three, if you count Excelsior Springs. The recent shuttering of the Archer Daniels Midland mill in North Kansas City marked another milestone in a generations-long trend. It has been sped by changing rules for railroads and ever more sophisticated logistics for transforming wheat into flour into food. Those changes have gradually but steadily shifted much of America's bread business out of the country's breadbasket. Modern economics and mechanics dictate that we feed our bakeries with fewer and larger mills and that we move them closer to where people live. That means shifting the age-old process of grinding grain, separating hull from kernel and bran from germ, closer to America's coastlines. In turn, that has steadily shuttered mills in the country's lightly populated, and heavily farmed, midsection. "It's cheaper to ship and then mill rather than the other way around," said Josh Sosland, the editor of Milling & Baking News in Kansas City. "It's that simple." For much of the 20th century, government regulations bundled the cost of shipping grain to the mill with the expense of delivering the resulting flour to the bakery. But federal deregulation of the railroads in 1980 put the industry on track toward shipping rates that made more sense for millers. So the story of 21st-century flour-making has become a reminder of how critical milelong trains are to the bread on your sandwich, the cake of your Twinkie or the crust on your large pepperoni with extra cheese. "Bakeries need to be close to where people are" so goods can cheaply be delivered fresh, said Mark Fowler, the associate director of the International Grains Program at Kansas State University. "The mills have been moving closer to the customer." First and foremost, the shift has been toward consolidation. In 1900, when the U.S. population was 76 million, the country was home to more than 13,000 flour mills, and Minneapolis was seen as the milling capital. Today, in a country of 310 million people, the number of mills is below 170 and falling. And now the 8.2 million pounds of flour ground from wheat in Los Angeles every day is by far the most in the country. Modern methods aim to keep momentum-killing, energy-wasting train stops to a minimum. So shippers tend to load up 100-car loads -- with cars capable of toting up to 110 tons of wheat each -- at grain elevators and haul that grain to a mill geared to a similar scale. Increasingly, those mills sit at the edge of urban areas where there's room for such huge trains to sidle up. The ADM mill in North Kansas City, by contrast, sits east of the junction of Interstate 29 and Armour Road. That's the middle, not the outskirts, of the Kansas City area's metropolitan sprawl. The area's remaining mills -- one operated by General Mills in Kansas City's East Bottoms area and another run by Cereal Food Processors in Kansas City, Kan. -- are all that's left from the dozens once situated here. That the North Kansas City plant operated as long as it did is a reflection of how glacial the transition to larger, exurb-based, coastal milling has taken. The investments in existing infrastructure are too substantial to simply toss away functioning plants. In fact, ADM didn't just walk away from the mill. Rather, city officials pressed it to sell to make way for a mixed-use retail development. North Kansas City paid $11.25 million for the facility and took possession Oct. 3. Now the city is seeking bids on demolition, a process likely to stretch into the spring. ADM says it doesn't know when the plant was built, but the grain giant bought it from Commander Larabee Corp. in 1929. It was the site of an explosion and fire -- not uncommon to grain storage facilities -- that knocked out its western side in 1979. Two people were injured in that incident. At its peak, the North Kansas City plant employed as many as 100 workers. It was retooled over the years and had 60 people on the payroll nearing the time of its close this fall, when it could crank out 2 million pounds of flour a day. Part of the shift toward larger mills has been driven by technology. Surely, making flour still means reducing a kernel of wheat to a fine powder. But the mechanical details of that have gotten ever more sophisticated. In particular, the grinding machines have been engineered to withstand higher volumes -- more tons per hour. Through the years, though, the job had always been much the same. "You clean the grain, temper it, grind it and sift it, grind it and sift it, and grind it and sift it some more," said Dan Wells, who once oversaw the plant. "Then you reduce all of the flour down to the bran." Compared to other mills built since the North Kansas City facility with its skyscraping elevators, this one was hamstrung by surrounding urban development that limited its space for parking rail cars. An ADM spokeswoman responded to questions about the company's decision to close the plant with an email. "We determined that closing this facility would allow us to improve the overall efficiency of our operations by shifting production to facilities with available capacity," she wrote. In some ways, the closing of plants like the one in North Kansas City began in the 1960s when truckers and, especially, barge operators began competing for wheat-hauling business. Their lower prices gradually began to push down rail shipping rates, a trend that accelerated with deregulation. "The railroads were forced to respond," said Michael Babcock, a transportation economist at K-State. "Suddenly, the rates for wheat were half what they were for flour." So even though 4 tons of wheat typically produces about 3 tons of flour, it was cheaper to move the grain rather than the powder. Once flour is produced from a mill, it's usually "fluidized" -- air is pumped into it so that it can flow like water into a tanker truck to be hauled to a bakery. "In the old days you'd put it into 50-pound bags and hand-load it into a truck," said Jim Bair, a spokesman for the North American Millers Association. "Today you've got to be more efficient to make the economics work." To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send email to [email protected]. Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/19/3217930/closing-of-nkc-flour-mill-reflects.html#ixzz1bKyfd3pR