Tour gives Illinois Agri-Women glimpse into flower and flour production

GRANVILLE, Ill. — Acres of plants including cacti, succulents, bedding plants, perennials and orchids are growing in greenhouses at Altman Plants.

“About 50% of the business our company does is cacti and succulent plants,” said Aaron Bivens, general manager of Altman Plants, located near Granville.

“The company was started by Ken and Deena Altman in the Los Angeles area in the mid-’70s,” said Bivens during a tour of the greenhouses organized by Illinois Agri-Women. “Ken is a plant collector and he was part of a network of people who collected cacti and succulents.”

Altman started to sell some of his plants to others in the group.

“That’s how the business started and then he bought a garden center, and now 50 years later, it’s this massive company,” Bivens said.

Plants from the 84-acre facility are sold wholesale to companies such as Lowe’s, Costco, Home Depot, Walmart and Trader Joe’s.

“We have an environmental control system that sets different temperatures and venting depending on what each plant needs,” Bivens said. “The succulents are pretty low maintenance and other plants have much more intensive needs.”

A tower boom irrigates over the top of the plants.

“We also have houses with flood floors that are controlled by a computer,” Bivens said. “It sends water to an area to flood the floor for a certain amount of time and then the water drains into a system underground and is pumped back into the tank.”

When planting seeds, Bivens said, the goal is to have complete trays of seedlings.

“We put these trays into the machine which takes a photograph of the tray and we train the machine to identify the good and bad plants,” he explained.

“The machine takes out the bad plant and puts a good plant from a donor tray into that spot,” he said. “Then the tray comes out full.”

In addition to their wholesale business, Altman Plants also markets plants online through sites like amazon.com or homedepot.com.

“The plants are shipped directly to consumers and that’s a growing part of our business,” Bivens said.

ADM Milling

On the second stop of the Illinois Agri-Women tour, members learned how wheat is milled into flour at the ADM Flour Mill and Terminal Elevator near Mendota.

“This started as a grain facility and the loop railroad track that goes around it was built in 2003,” said Alex Bemis, ADM regional commercial manager for Mendota/Minneapolis milling.

“Our milling division was trying to find a more centralized location and they chose Mendota because we already had the land and also because we have this loop track,” she said. “We get wheat via rail and we reload the cars with corn that ships out to the gulf and other places.”

The first flour was shipped from the Mendota facility in the fall of 2019.

“The mill has 20 concrete storage bins which is about 2.9 million bushels of storage for the wheat or about 44 days of storage,” Bemis said.

Three types of wheat are milled at this facility — soft red winter, hard red spring and hard red winter.

“The soft red winter is brought in by truck because it is grown locally,” Bemis said. “The hard red spring wheat is grown in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota; the hard red winter wheat is grown in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma and they both come in on rail in 100- to 120-car shuttles.”

A kernel of wheat consists of germ, bran and endosperm. Flour is milled from the endosperm which is about 83% of the kernel.

“The bran goes into feed that we sell and the germ can go to feed and it also can be used for human consumption like Cream of Wheat,” Bemis said. “Right now we have a customer that processes it into oil.”

The milling process starts with cleaning the wheat and then water is put on the wheat for a certain amount of time so the kernels break open easier to get the maximum yield of flour.

The ADM facility has three milling units that have a series of grinding rolls, some of them are smooth rolls and others are corrugated. The mill has the capacity of making more than 3 million pounds of flour each day.

“Our A mill is used to grind hard red winter wheat and the B mill is where we grind the hard red spring wheat,” Bemis said. “The C mill is a swing mill so usually we use it for soft red winter, but we can use it to grind hard red winter, as well.”

The Mendota flour mill is different than most mills.

“This is the first mill ADM built from the ground up so it is fully pneumatic and lots of things can be done with computers,” Bemis said.

Flour from the mill can be shipped in three ways and bulk truck load-out is No. 1.

“We have 12 load-out bins and three load-out spouts for the trucks,” Bemis said.

“We also have the ability to load rail cars and we package flour in 50-pound bags,” she said. “The flour from here goes to bakeries in the Midwest.”