The opening of the Peco feed mill in Corning earlier this year provided a glimmering counterpoint to the closing of the 44-year-old L.A. Darling plant.
The $35 million investment by Peco Foods Inc. of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, also broke a long dry spell of big industrial development news for Corning.
“We hadn’t had anything major like this probably since the 1970s,” said Mike Vinson, board member of the Corning Area Chamber of Commerce.
For over a generation, the Darling plant provided several hundred jobs making store fixtures for Wal-Mart Stores during its march to becoming the largest retailer in the world.
The closing of the Darling plant in Piggott last year delivered a double blow to Clay County. The subsidiary of Chicago’s Marmon Group Inc. was once touted as the largest single employer in the county.
The loss of Darling joined a string of layoffs and plant closings over the years that whittled away chunks of Corning’s once-thriving industrial base.
The Peco feed mill’s projected workforce of 50 can’t match Darling’s employment level. But the company’s capital investment, the mill’s 34 new jobs and its current annual payroll of nearly $1.7 million are greeted with relief.
“It means a lot,” said F.B. Manatt, a retired civic leader in Corning. “In fact, it will bring a lot of things with it. Peco is a very good company.”
Outside of town, four growers have built 30 poultry houses to be part of Peco’s supply chain, receiving chicks from the Pocahontas hatchery and feed from the Corning mill to raise chickens for the $165 million processing plant in Pocahontas.
More Clay County growers will be joining the Peco pipeline, too.
“I have another 19 farmers with another 144 houses under construction or at the bank finishing up their financing,” said Duane Weems, live operations manager for Peco.
Each of the houses represents a $310,000 development that will shelter up to 25,700 birds during a 63-day growing cycle. Those numbers represent a combined $53.9 million investment by Clay County growers.
Changing Times
Darling sold its 548,015-SF complex in Corning for $1.2 million in December to a joint venture of New Mill Capital Holdings of New York, Crossland Construction Co. of Columbus, Kansas, and Infinity Asset Solutions Inc. of Concord, Ontario.
The group flipped it in January for $2.2 million to Commerce Warehousing LLC of Jonesboro, which is marketing the facility.
“We thought we had some deals lined up to refill some of that space, but it just takes time,” said Jeff Throesch, vice president of Commerce Warehousing.
“We have some potentials. We’re looking to lease the whole building, or it could be divided up into smaller pieces.”
Darling’s dwindling Corning production was shifted to Tennessee. Darling was part of a boon of expansions and new manufacturers that further diversified Corning’s agricultural and service-based economy.
Darling was among five companies that came to town and generated more than 900 jobs during a 20-year span. All five have since closed shop in Corning.
The last in but the first out after a 12-year run was Corning Distribution Co., owned by Carter Carburetor Co. of St. Louis. Its 1984 closing was linked with the rising deployment of fuel injection systems in automobile engines instead of carburetors.
The Carter facility was ultimately merged with the adjoining Darling facility, adding more than 200,000 SF to the plant footprint.
Darling and Carter provided a one-two punch of big plant announcements for Corning in 1971.
The following year, representatives of the city were among the honored guests at the 24th annual Arkansas Community Development Awards Day luncheon in the Lafayette Hotel’s Skyway Ballroom in downtown Little Rock.
“The people just came together and really worked,” F.B. Manatt, a former Corning city councilman and former state representative (1967-71), said in a recent interview. “You can’t say it was any one person. We would go home and eat supper and come back to the bank to meet and get things going.
“We were looking for anybody who would be a good addition to the community.”
The first industrial recruit was Clayton Shoe Co., an affiliate of Johansen Brothers Shoe Co. of St. Louis. Its
Corning shoe factory opened in 1959, expanded in 1969 and closed in 1999.
Basler Electric Co. of Highland, Illinois, began transformer production in Corning in 1965 and followed with expansions in 1969, 1973, 1975 and 1978. Basler closed the facility in 2004 as production shifted to Mexico.
A year later, the Hart’s furniture factory closed under the cloud of insolvency after opening in 1978 and expanding in 1981. Hart’s of Arkansas was a subsidiary of Hart’s Manufacturing Co. of Collierville, Tennessee.
Peco Numbers
The Peco Foods feed mill in Corning is cranking up production in support of the company’s new $200 million integrated poultry complex in northeast Arkansas.
Since starting operations in February, the mill’s output has grown to keep pace with the build-out of growers supplying chickens for Peco’s Pocahontas processing plant 33 miles to the southwest.
Weekly traffic delivers 191 truckloads of corn or milo for Peco’s feed blend. The grain shipments from area farms are augmented by a weekly average of 18 railcars of soymeal from the Archer Daniels Midland processing plant in southwest Missouri near Deerfield.
Outgoing trucks transport about 326 loads of feed weekly to Peco growers. The combined daily count of trucks hauling grain in and trucks hauling feed out averages more than 100.
“It’s just unbelievable,” Corning Mayor Rob Young said of the truck-every-five-minutes activity.
At full tilt, the Corning mill is capable of producing 17,340 tons of feed during a five-day workweek.
“We’re at about 8,200 tons a week, which is pretty close to 50 percent capacity,” said Weems, the Peco live operations manager. “As our production continues to increase, we’ll start a second shift at the feed mill.”
The Corning mill’s workforce of 34 will increase to 50 when another shift is added. That’s expected to happen in 2017, possibly as early as the second quarter.
Last year, the project’s trio of towering 600,000-bushel silos joined the Corning skyline, a northern neighbor of the Riceland Foods grain complex.
Construction of the Peco feed mill, with its 145-foot tall granaries, was completed pretty much according to plan.
“We didn’t have any real surprises,” Weems said. “The construction took about 18 months. The feed mill actually takes longer to build than the processing plant.”