(Radio Iowa) – The U-S Ag Department’s Rural Development Agency has approved grants for several Iowa projects. Iowa director Mike Sexton says one-point-four million dollars is going to Iowa State’s Agricultural Marketing Resource Center for value added grants. “You know, in the beef industry, they find a specific niche like grass fed or a specific breed, and then they process it and they market that. And then a lot of our gardens that we have, that have sprung up, it all leads up to the table to market or farm to market or farm to table,” he says.
Sexton says a lot of the grants go to help with marketing the special products. “You know, the days of putting an ad in the paper are long gone and now we need to use Facebook and TikTok Instagram, and so for old farmers like myself, that’s a whole other avenue of advertising that we just aren’t familiar with,” he says. Sexton says six loans to coops were made through the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant program.
“We work with co-ops, whether it’s the electric co-ops or the telecommunication co-ops, and we actually partner with them because they are in our communities and they are good community members,” Sexton says. He says they make the coops a zero interest loan they pass through to the entities that do the projects. And so it can be all kinds of community projects or it can be specific projects for manufacturing,” he says.
The Corn Belt Power Cooperative received a 952-thousand dollar loan for Kinetic Technologies for a new manufacturing facility in Algona. The project is expected to create eight new jobs. Central Iowa Power Cooperative received a one-million dollar loan to provide to Continental Manufacturing Chemist in Huxley. The company will purchase equipment and software to help expand the company’s custom packaging business and the project is expected to create 100 new jobs.
The Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative received a one million dollar loan to provide to T-S-M Holding/M-3 Fabrication to purchase new powder coating equipment and construct a 56-thousand square foot building expansion to house the company’s powder coating processes in Bloomfield. This project is expected to create ten new jobs.
Heartland Power Cooperative and the Osage Municipal Utilities each received a one million dollar loan to provide to A to Z Drying in Osage for the purchase of a 234-thousand square foot production and warehouse facility. The company plans to expand its customized spray drying business and is expected to create 19 new jobs. The North West Rural Electric Cooperative received a one million dollar loan for Hemp Agra to purchase equipment for the industrial hemp processing facility in Rock Valley, in Sioux County. This project is expected to create 20 new jobs.
