Crew members from RailWorks in Chehalis work on the track at the Port of Chehalis.
Crew members from RailWorks in Chehalis work on the track at the Port of Chehalis.
The transload facility and rail spur project at the Port of Chehalis is on track for completion by the end of June — just in time for a harvest of 200 acres of malting barley in early July that has been grown by southwest Washington farmers throughout the winter.
“The project is on schedule and budget so that’s great news there,” said Randy Mueller, Port of Chehalis CEO, when addressing the port commissioners at a meeting Thursday morning.
Creating a grain storage and transload facility has been discussed by the Port of Chehalis since 2018 after the Lewis County Farm Bureau invited Mueller and Matt Matayoshi, executive director of the Lewis County Economic Development Council to meet and discuss local farmers’ needs. One was the demand for a grain storage facility.
A combination of factors, including loss of contracts with National Frozen Foods and effects of the 2007 flood on farmland, left many southwest Washington farmers without buyers. The transload facilities grant farmers the ability to transport their crops to more buyers as transport by rail is more efficient than by truck. It also allows farmers to store their crops until they are ready to sell.
“There’s a different price between truck delivery and rail delivery. Partly because the buyers know that if you’re delivering by truck you probably don’t have ample storage so there’s an urgency in marketing that product. If we can aggregate and store grains, we can wait for the market to improve before we make the sale,” said Mike Peroni, the Southwest Washington Grain project manager with the Northwest Agriculture Business Center.
In April of 2019, the Lewis County Commissioners approved $800,000 from the distressed counties, also referred to as the “.09 fund”, for the rail-to-truck transload facility showing the county’s support for the project.
The Port of Chehalis has set aside 8.2 acres of land that has been dedicated to the transload and storage facility. The plans are to keep expanding the storage in the future in phases. The final facility is estimated to have a storage capacity of 3,520 tons.
The construction on the track has been done by RailWorks, a railing contractor located in Chehalis.
“By the end of July we’ll be done with getting all of that malting barley out of town and it’ll be turned into beer. At that point, we are hands-off but we are very interested in the results and I will see if I can obtain some of the resulting beverages that are produced from the fruits of our labors, so to speak,” said Mueller, with a smile.
