Canadian agribusiness company BrettYoung has made a $20 million investment in NorthCore, a facility equipped with the latest technologies for cleaning, sorting and packaging turf seed. The 60,000-square-foot facility was built to achieve a new level of capacity while maintaining BrettYoung’s high standards of efficiency and quality.
“We’ve had progressive growth every year for 15 years running,” said Cory Baseraba, BrettYoung COO. “Our customers continue to want more products from us, and we’ve been limited by what we can provide mainly by how much we can grow and process. With several initiatives underway to increase turf seed production in Western Canada, we still needed to increase our processing capabilities to service our customers. And to do that with the same high level of service we want to provide is what drove the decision to invest in NorthCore.”
NorthCore features one cleaning line right now, with space for three more lines as supply grows. It has a pneumatic conveying system (a network of pipelines that move seed with air) to transfer seed around the facility, blending and packaging lines that process seed three times more quickly than the legacy equipment, and is all run digitally through centralized monitoring and control systems.
“NorthCore was designed to focus on turf seed,” said Baseraba. “With a focus on those products, it reduces the number of changeouts, downtime, and cleaning time. This also allows our employees to focus on specific aspects of the job and make it their specialty, making the entire system more efficient.”
