AgCertain, the maker of food products and renewable chemicals, recently broke ground on a new rail spur to better serve its growing campus in Boone.

The Ames-based AgCertain is focused on products and services that meet the growing demand from consumers who want to know where their products come from.

The rail spur is part of phase 3 of the company’s expansion of its 120-acre campus in Boone, where it receives and sends glycerin and edible oils with support of the Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad.

Daniel Oh, AgCertain president and CEO, said the company built some rail in 2019 when it began operating in Boone, but it now needs to expand that capacity.

“That will allow for much greater volumes of freight as we’ve expanded and improved our production facility there,” he said.

It follows the completion of phase 2 last year, which involved the acquisition of an acreage to put in a tank farm (an area to store oils and biochemicals in large tanks) and upgrades inside its facility that “allows us in one of our three edible oil refineries to process just about anything the world can make that would be delivered to the Midwest for refining and then sales onto consumers,” Oh said.  

Oh, who created AgCertain in 2018, declined to place a specific value of the company’s growth in Boone, but said it is in the “tens of millions of dollars. This is well into eight figures.”

AgCertain has added a “few dozen very high-quality jobs to the site,” Oh said. “And as we expand over time, I think we’ll end up with a couple of hundred jobs out there, but that will take over 10 years to do that.”

The bigger benefit of the AgCertain operation is the specialty processing, marketing and distribution capabilities, Oh said.

“So farmers and producers in the area can begin adjusting if they wish to these specialty crops that need a place to be processed and sold from,” he said. “One of our goals is to ensure that as products and crops are being upgraded in the Midwest, more of their value stays in the Midwest.”

Oh cited the increased difficulty exporting products overseas because of supply chain disruptions, saying there is demand for greater flexibility in manufacturing capability and an ability to switch to other products quickly.

“We think we’re going to add greater value to the marketplace that are purchased at ultimately higher prices,” he said. “We’re building out a capability that is absent in Iowa to the scale we’re doing, and this will help connect to other supply and value chains that you hear a lot of about with the Cultivation Corridor, Iowa State University and the general Central Iowa area where we can further cement the knowledge in the area,” he said.

Oh said another project that will be announced next year is the construction of a wastewater treatment facility to treat and reuse industrial wastewater.

“Wastewater processing is super important because it lowers carbon intensity and helps other companies in the area to have a place that’s closer to deliver to to get their stuff processed, and then we’ll reuse that water in other processes,” Oh said. “This will lead us building biogas generation on the side, lead us toward fermentation and making other value-added products with local sugars, including glycerin and corn sugars, and allow us to do contract manufacturing for others, as well as our own products.”

Oh said Central Iowa is a great location for AgCertain to operate and expand.

“We have a great employee base and a critical mass of knowledge that we can pull from,” he said. We are in Boone on the Union Pacific Railroad right off Interstate 35 and state Highway 30, so we have really good logistics, and Iowa State provides an annual supply of really smart, talented folks who are inclined to do the kind of work we do.”

Oh said the area is also well suited to address the challenge of getting customers what they want, when they want it and at an affordable price.

“All the assets that think through it are here,” he said. “It just works well to build the next level of complexity.”