Zeeland Farm Services, A hill of soybeans

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : April 2007

Zeeland Farm Services watches the market to maximize gains, while using renewable energy to remain self-sufficient, Gary Toushek reports

Soybeans have been grown in the US since the late 1700s, mainly for livestock feed, but they were not used as a consumer product until the 1920s. Today, several varieties of the soybean, considered an oilseed, are cultivated for livestock feed, industrial uses (such as biodiesel), vegetable oils, and other food products.

Robert D. Meeuwsen started an agricultural and transportation business in 1950 when he founded Meeuwsen Produce and Grain in Zeeland, MI. The company expanded to become Zeeland Farm Services, Inc. (ZFS) in 1977, providing additional agricultural services, namely trucking, marketing, storing grain, and selling fertilizers. In 1992 Robert Meeuwsen sold the company to three of his sons. In 1995 ZFS added a soybean processing plant, and in 2003, a soybean oil refinery.

The list of products and services the company offers today is considerable for its size (160 employees): a grain division (grain marketing for farmers); an ingredient division (feed merchandising); an elevator division (custom mixing, seed sales, and a storage capacity of 3.5 million bushels); and a freight division of about 90 tractor-trailers, including dumps, tanks, and containers. These are dispatched from Zeeland, MI, and De Soto, GA, to haul grain and commercial and bulk commodities, as well as other materials, with a full-service maintenance garage and wash bay at the Michigan location.

ZFS’s soybean processing plant is the largest in Michigan and handles about 28,000 bushels of soybeans per day. It operates 24 hours a day, 360 days a year. Soybeans received from farmers undergo cleaning (removing pods, stems, stones, and other debris), followed by conditioning (heating slowly), passing through a process dryer, cracking, removing the hulls (which are used as fiber in feed), more cracking, then flaking. The second stage is extraction: hexane solvent is used to extract the oil from the flake, then the hexane is removed from the flake by distillation. The flake is toasted, de-solventized, dried, cooled, and ground into protein meal; most becomes animal feed. The oil goes to the RBD facility, where it’s refined, bleached, and deodorized according to customers’ needs.

Refining takes out the phosphorus and free fatty acids, and bleaching takes color and chlorophyll out. Deodorization is a high-temperature, high-vacuum, steam-distillation process that removes volatile flavor and odor compounds, preventing oxidation from occurring and transforming the oil into a bland-tasting clear liquid.

The company’s specialty products are “Identity Preserved” (IP). IP agricultural production means maintaining the unique traits or quality characteristics of a crop from seed through transportation and handling, up until the processing stage. ZFS has its own line of low saturated and low linolenic seed, called ZFS Select, that provides farmers with opportunities for $0.80 to $1 premiums per bushel, provided they return the crop to ZFS for processing and refining. ZFS also contracts with multiple farmers in Michigan to grow non-GMO and Vistive soybeans. ZFS Select soybeans are processed into IP vegetable oils and specialty meal, which is exported to Japan for soy sauce.

ZFS’s brand name for its IP vegetable oils is Zoye (formerly known as SelectOil), and they include low saturated fat oil, low linolenic oil, and regular soybean oil. The low-saturated oil contains half the fat of regular soybean oil. Most of it is sold to the US Department of Agriculture’s school lunch program. The low linolenic oil contains less than 3 percent linolenic acid, compared with 8 percent in traditional soybeans. The result is a more stable oil that doesn’t require hydrogenation (a process that increases shelf life and flavor stability but also creates trans fatty acid, which is linked to coronary heart disease). Zoye is advantageous for consumers and for the company, since the US Food and Drug Administration now requires nutrition labels to specify the content of trans fat in food products.

ZFS’s soybean products are traded as commodities on the Chicago Board of Trade, and half its soybean oil, in total volume, is going to biodiesel fuel manufacturers, says Eric Meeuwsen, grandson of the founder and manager of the soybean processing plant and RBD facility. The company uses biodiesel, which it buys from the fuel manufacturers to whom it sells raw oil, for its trucks.

Employees are cross-trained for most job functions. Both the soybean processing plant and the RBD facility are automated and computerized; line starts and stops can be made from the control rooms. The temperature, humidity, and vacuum controls have alarms, and operators do hourly walk-throughs to manually record metrics to verify computer readouts. Quality assurance is according to customer standards, and every customer is different, says Meeuwsen. “Food safety is a major concern in the US, and maintaining purity and quality is of utmost importance to us.” For incoming soybeans the company uses third-party certification—Michigan Grain Inspection Services has a mini-lab onsite to test the soybeans before they’re unloaded; ZFS’s RBD facility has a lab for testing oils. The soybean processing plant is shut down twice annually for a week for maintenance and to upgrade equipment where necessary.

Last year more grain bins were added for storage at harvest time; this year ZFS is adding bins for IP soybeans to make it easier to take them in during harvest and keep them separate from other grades. “We’re happy with our production and utilize expertise from outside suppliers,” says Meeuwsen. “Improvements are constantly being made to ensure customer satisfaction.”

Despite being the largest soybean processing plant in Michigan, Meeuwsen points out that, relatively speaking, Zeeland is still small—“Of the 70 or so soybean refining plants in the US, we’re probably at the bottom in terms of size”—yet the company has an effective business model for renewable resources and self-sufficiency. The brothers have created their own renewable energy system, beginning with a landfill gas project in 2005, with help from the Autumn Hills Landfill and NANR. ZFS’s plant boilers ran on natural gas until a few years ago, but with increasing gas prices, the company bought an allotment of landfill gas and had a 16-inch pipeline constructed that runs six and a half miles. The methane from the landfill is captured into a gas compression station, where it’s filtered and pressurized into ZFS’s pipeline and then routed into boilers to create steam for processing. “When we built the soybean processing plant in 1995, natural gas cost $2 to $3 per unit. Today it’s about $7, so the methane pipeline helps give us an edge on competitors,” says Meeuwsen. ZFS also has a Caterpillar reciprocating engine, a co-generating unit that produces electric power, with the exhaust going to a waste boiler that makes steam.

With energy and the environment in mind, ZFS’s new administration building was designed to meet silver certification for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). In order to qualify for silver certification, a facility must achieve more than 50 percent of core credits. To determine that the building is environmentally friendly/green, prerequisites and credits are given in six categories: sustainable site, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and the innovation and design process.

These days ZFS is looking for value-added applications for its products, focusing more on the niche market in specialty soybean and grain products, especially IP. “The key is,” says Meeuwsen, “in order to get into the specialty soybean meal market, we had to be flexible. Because most competitors have bigger plants, they aren’t as flexible. They offer set products and sell them. We’ve spent many years developing proper protocols and specs. We’ll take in customers’ raw products and run them through the plant to get the finished products they are after. An example is crude wheat germ oil that we refine and bleach.”

ZFS’s major Japanese customer has his own processing plant and had processed his own meal for soy sauce customers for decades. So when genetically modified Roundup Ready seed emerged in the marketplace a few years ago, that Japanese customer bought shiploads of soybeans from various international sources that could not be guaranteed to be IP. He soon changed his buying habits because he no longer had a certifiable way of verifying quality for his own customers.

“Now Japan confidently buys from us precisely for that reason: we certify our sources,” Meeuwsen says. “We IP-verify all the way, with a paper trail—from the seed to the chemicals and fertilizers used, to the growing and harvesting, to receiving, to processing.”

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