MORAN — Things are changing quickly at what used to be the old Klein Tools plan north of Moran.
Sometime by early February, Elliott Protein & Oil’s newest apparatus, a state-of-the-art soybean extruder — an Insta-Pro Press — will be online.
Shortly thereafter, Jason and Tera Elliott and their business partners, Steve Rinck and Greg and Karla LaForge hope to add enough bins to accommodate sufficient soybean storage in the roughly 70,000 square-foot facility.
Elliott Protein and Oil, 1469 U.S. 59, is one of the area’s newest mills dedicated to processing non-genetically modified soybeans (Non-GMO), having opened in October.
“Right now, we’re just ‘poor-boying’ it and still producing soybean meal until we can get everything up and going,” Jason Elliott said this week.
“Come back in 90 days, and it’ll look completely different around here,” Rinck added.
The Elliotts, et al, hope to tap into the burgeoning non-GMO soybean market.
There appears to be plenty of interest. They recently hosted a community meeting with area soybean farmers to talk about non-GMO products. A crowd of about 60 attended.
“The market has really grown in the past five years or so,” Elliott said. “You’re seeing it on the store shelves as well.”
“This isn’t something that’s against GMO soybeans,” Tera Elliott quickly added. “It’s all about giving the customers a choice, and that’s what people want.”
For generations, farmers grew non-GMO soybeans until their introduction in the mid-1990s as a means to become more resistant to Roundup and other pesticides.
However, as weeds developed resistance to those herbicides, producers — and consumers — have seen the pendulum swing back to organic or non-GMO varieties.
ELLIOTT Protein & Oil is much like other soybean mills dotting the landscape.
The beans are tested, cleaned, ground and run through an extruder in order to separate the oil and soybean meal byproducts.
Both the oil and the meal can be sold off and used for a multitude of uses, from providing feed for livestock to the manufacture of plastic products.
