MASSIVE NEW PLANT: Record-breaking Investment in Grand Forks

GRAND FORKS, ND (trfnews.i234.me) A massive, new agri-foods plant is coming to Grand Forks. The Director of the Grand Forks Economic Development Corporation says,, “It’s the largest investment in the history of Grand Forks”.
all right neil carlson here on the phone with me keith lund uh the director of the grand forks economic development corporation there’s a big deal in the works apparently with the agribusiness in grand forks i guess what can you tell us about it yeah we uh just uh this week learned that poupon group is going to build their north american processing plant in grand forks agribusiness opportunity that’s focused on corn as a feedstock and will produce it will have 233 direct jobs and when you count total indirect and induce at 750 jobs in our community so we’re excited about the opportunity and thrilled that they chose grand forks for their home and again this company or you can’t say the direct name of it or you know the company is fufon group fufong usa fufg uh usa they’re chinese-based uh organization but they’re expanding out of china and the grand forks operation will be their first plant outside outside of their home country and uh more specifically what is it exactly they produce that’s it’ll be a wet corn milling processing facility and they produce a number of uh have a number of value streams this particular plant will initially be focused on uh animal and nutrition health and a couple of the by-products or off takes will be animal feed and livestock feeding pet food okay and uh where is the tentative location for this it’ll be on north grand forks uh uh nor the section north of uh sim plot and philadelphia macaroni they’ll be acquiring 370 acres of land from primarily from two owners and uh they’ll start because they intend to start construction in the spring all right so does it take a year or two to complete this plan yeah it’s over two-year construction is what they what they think uh so they’ll be doing quite a bit of work with the city in terms of planning and zoning and that type of activity as well as finalizing their engineering designs as well so like i said they’ll intend to wrap all that up this winter and early spring so they can start as soon as possible in the spring and as you said i believe this is a private money can you see how big of an investment this is or or in relation to other things around the region you know they are finalizing their estimates with their engineers in terms of overall cost so we don’t have that number yet but we have a sense of range we won’t share it until we know what the actual number is or their actual estimate but we do believe that this is going to be the largest private investment in the history of grand forks all right okay thanks for talking to me absolutely neil good talking to you