Visiting one of the largest mills in the world

ADM, Archer Daniels Midland Company, is one of the biggest global food processing and commodity trading grain businesses.

It has sites all over the world and in the US has about 300 locations dotted around the country where farmers can sell their grain. In Ireland, ADM operates mainly as a grain and animal feed trader and importer.

Its headquarters are in Chicago, but from a processing point of view one of its biggest facilities is located in Decatur, a small city in the middle of the state of Illinois.

While you drive from Chicago to Decatur all you see is corn (maize), soybeans and a small bit of wheat.

The first place we visited at ADM’s site in Decatur was the trading floor.

Over 400 traders work in an expansive area with a markets board lining the top of the room.

These traders are buying and selling grain and oilseeds for ADM, and also the products needed to run the business.

They are working on logistics and storage. Outside that building is where the product moves in and out.

The plant by numbers

When you visit the Decatur site the first thing that hits you is the scale. You may get stuck at the train tracks – 150 rail cars move on the site every day.

There are seven plants on site, six producing consumer products. and a water treatment plant.

There is also a power generation plant and a pipe that leaves the site with carbon dioxide to be stored underground.

That power plant was the first to be built in the 1960s and the corn plant was built in the 1970s.

Fifteen hundred employees work on campus everyday in operations, while another 1,000 contractors come onto site.

The business is the largest employer in Decatur and 25% of the business’s global assets are located here.

As we drove around the site on a bus we saw ethanol storage tanks, pipes to transport gas, and a coal bunker that fuels the power plant.

Approximately 55 rail cars of coal move in every day and 7,000MW of electricity are produced – 60% of the plant’s requirements and enough to power 200,000 homes. By 2045, the aim is to use natural gas and the move to cleaner energy is underway.

It is cheaper to produce their own electricity, although in the trading room electricity is also traded in the futures markets.

The corn plant in Decatur is half a mile long. It’s a wet mill which basically means the corn kernels are soaked until they pop and they are processed into many different products.

The plant takes in about 500,000bu or 17,000 tonnes of corn every day.

To put that into perspective, here at home that would be 607 lorries each carrying 28t of grain.

The main products from the mill include starch, which is the most valuable, gluten, protein and germ. The plant allows compounds to be separated. The starch is processed further to produce fuel-grade ethanol. One million gallons are produced per day, enough to fuel 500,000 consumer vehicles using a 10% blend with petrol.

High fructose corn syrup is also produced, enough to fill 15 million 20oz (591ml) bottles. This mill produces enough animal feed to feed 1.5 million head of cattle a day.

Industrial antifreeze is produced, toothpaste ingredients, flavour extenders – every part of the corn kernel is utilised and shipped across ADM’s site for use in the human food chain, animal feed or industrial uses.

As we drive down the road we pass the Decatur rail yard with 1,600 ADM rail cars. The company has 26 miles of track and 4,000 cars come in and out of the site with coal, chemicals and processing aids. Decatur is serviced by four of the five national railway companies.

In the west plant, oilseeds are processed. A massive 240,000bu of soybeans are processed each day in the plant. The equivalent of one million 48oz (1,419ml) bottles of oil are produced every day for cooking.

Corn germ is also brought to the west plant to extract the oil. That germ is then brought back and used to produce the corn gluten feed pellets. Some of these pellets make their way to Ireland.

In fact, Ireland is quite a big buyer of these pellets purchasing about 320,000t in 2023, 400,000t in 2021 and 500,000 in 2018, the year of the bad drought.

While this mill is the largest wet mill in the world, ADM’s plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa grinds the most corn every day. The plant uses an awful lot of water and has ponds with 15-18 million gallons of water. Any water used on site is treated to nearly drinking quality and is not chlorinated.

The main product from corn at the mill is ethanol, but while it is the main product it is by no means the only one. ADM produces multiple different products from corn for animal feed to food ingredients to products for the gut microbiome.

It’s interesting to hear about and maybe you’re wondering why we’re writing about it here.

The scale of this plant and the wide variety of products produced was an eye opener as to what Irish tillage farmers are competing against.

From one grain – corn – ADM is using every part of that grain to produce a lengthy list of products in the one place.

By doing so, it is cutting out the middlemen, keeping costs down and generating as much profit as possible.

If Ireland was to have a mill processing 17,000t per day then it would only be able to operate to operate for four months of the year.

However, we can learn from this large-scale business. We could have malt for Irish drinks and brewers grains for animal feed.

We can make more from what we have and add value all along the chain, using every part of the grain and creating a closed-loop system.