When you take a bite of ham at the holiday dinner table or on your daily lunch sandwich, reward circuits are activated in your brain. You feel pleasure as your brain calculates the nutritional value of the protein. The amino acids go to work aiding your metabolism, and the selenium helps defend your body from infection.

It’s unlikely you’re thinking about the pig’s diet at that moment, but to get from piglet to market, pigs need to eat well too. It takes seven to 10 distinct formulas over a pig’s lifetime to efficiently raise a healthy animal, from nutrient-dense starter feed, through weeks of high protein, to high energy finish.

That kind of feed is made locally at Farmers Elevator & Exchange in Kalona.

What looks like a cluster of storage silos sandwiched between JW’s Foods and Hershberger Oil on the south side of Hwy 22 started life as a feed mill for English River Pellets in 1964. After being sold to Archer Daniels Midland in 2011, it suffered a five-year period in which it didn’t produce a pound of feed. But feed production has been back online since its purchase by FEE in 2022, and the Wapello-based company is now on a mission to grow its capacity.

“One of the issues that we have is that it’s very manual,” General Manager Mike Shindelar says when we meet at the Kalona office. “When I took over, one of the things I looked at was, how do we increase our potential opportunity for growth?”

The feed mill produces around 200 different formulas of livestock feed, mainly for pigs but also chickens, cattle, horses, goats and sheep – the quantity mirrors what farmers raise here. For the most part what comes out of the mill is trucked to farms within a 50-mile radius in three- to 24-ton quantities, but some is also bagged for smaller operations.

Aside from main ingredients like cracked corn and soybean meal that are deposited into the 5-ton batch mixer from bins, “Everything else has to be measured by hand into five-gallon buckets and dumped into the mixer,” Shindelar explains. He likens the process to making cookies: flour and sugar pours in, then you measure and add the vanilla by hand. In this case, the “vanilla” is micronutrients, small quantities of essentials like amino acids or calcium.

This process works but isn’t what you’d call optimal; having to manually work in batches limits what the mill can produce each day.

Isn’t there a way to automate this, Shindelar wondered?

When at a farm show about a year ago in Des Moines, he discovered the answer was yes, and that a company in Pella was making exactly what the feed mill needed.

“With this system there’s a series of calibrated measuring augers that take all the various parts and pieces that are ingredients that go into a recipe and measures them and puts them into a mixing auger,” Shindelar explains. “Literally you can run feed continuously versus doing a batch.”

Over the last year the feed mill has been working to install and accommodate the new system. As the old warehouse was wonky and needed to be replaced, a new one was constructed on the same footprint. Employees moved storage and have been working around the recalibration, but it’s expected that by the end of April, the new system will be online.

It’s a precision, streamlined beauty that Shindelar hopes will benefit their customers – small to mid-size, independent, local producers.

“Existing companies want to grow, so we talked to them about what that percentage looks like. By doing this, we can allow them to expand, which is something that they want to do,” he says. FEE will also be able to better accommodate producers who need specialty feeds.

Farmers Elevator & Exchange’s feed mill in Kalona may look a little different from the street these days, but the real change is what’s inside.

And that change may just be the beginning of a prosperous new chapter for local farmers.