BusinessTN

East Tennessee soybean farmers are about to get crushed. And that’s a good thing.

Brent Best, chief operations officer with the Blount Greenback Farmers Co-op in Maryville, wants Blount County to be the first to bring soybean crushing back to Tennessee. Best hopes to open a plant in Greenback by spring 2007.

Crushing soybeans extracts oil that is the preferred component to mix with pure diesel to create the cleaner burning alternative fuel, biodiesel. As demand continues to increase, soybean oil could become liquid gold for regional farmers desperate to sustain, and possibly grow, their agricultural endeavors.

Yet, the opportunity for them to become breakout biodiesel commodity suppliers has been hindered because there are no soybean crushing facilities close by. (The state was home to crushers 15 years ago before they were consolidated, then closed.) Shipping soybeans out-of-state for this process costs farmers upwards of $0.25 per bushel in freight costs, blunting any whole hog charge into soybean production.

A small crushing plant like the one Best is proposing would only need two employees to operate, handling one-half million to one million bushels of beans in its startup year. He’s lined up private financing, but still awaits state funding and the official go-ahead to build the crusher.

“Our goal is to buy all the state’s soybeans that we can,” Best says. Tennessee is the 17th largest among the country’s soybean producers. Farmers across the state harvested a healthy million acres of soybeans yielding 41.8 million bushels last year.

The northwest part of the state along the Mississippi River cultivates the majority of those soybeans, but the greatest demand for biodiesel is in East Tennessee, says Jonathan Overly, executive director of the East Tennessee Clean Fuels Coalition. And it’s no secret that the Knoxville metro area has ranked near the top of several national poor air quality listings in recent years.

“We’re blessed as of this year to have [Gov. Bredesen] really start to put alternative fuels on his radar. Finding ways to help a local group like the [Blount Greenback] co-op is one of the key little steps we have to start making,” Overly says.

In February, Bredesen allocated $4 million to the cause, creating a new alternative fuels task force. Best and the co-op’s crushing team continues to sit idle until the state decides where to bestow its financial blessings—and when. feedback: shoemaker@businesstn.com