Pioneer Hi-Bred Production Location in Rushville, Ind., Celebrates 40 Years of Grower Service

RUSHVILLE, IND.- The Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont business, seed production location in Rushville, Ind., celebrates its 40th anniversary today with an open house for regional growers and customers, offering a tour of the latest in seed conditioning technology and presentations by Pioneer Supply Management executives.

First built in 1967, the Pioneer Rushville facility serves growers in southeastern Indiana and southern Ohio with high-yielding Pioneer® brand corn and wheat seed. The seed is produced by more than 70 corn and wheat growers in Rush, Shelby, Bartholomew, Decatur and Johnston counties in Indiana.

The Rushville location has warehouse capacity for about 700,000 bags with a conditioning tower that can handle 600 bushels an hour. The facility has 34 bulk storage bins with a total capacity of 400,000 bushels. There are two shellers that process 3,000 bushels an hour and 70 dryer bins that hold 1,200 bushels each.

“We’re extremely proud to have served our growers with quality seed for 40 years and look forward to continuing this long into the future,” says Bill Taufmann, Rushville plant manger. “This is a time of tremendous opportunity for those in agriculture and we’re glad we can work with growers to provide the highest-yielding seed in the industry to help them get the greatest value from each acre of land.”

In addition to the facility tour, growers will hear from Mike Gumina, vice president of supply management for Pioneer, and Bill Tomlinson, director of supply operations for corn, who will be speaking to tour participants after lunch.

More than 38 full-time employees work at Rushville throughout the year, as well as about 1,000 seasonal employees during detasseling and harvest seasons.

Managers at the Rushville plant most recently built a new bulk storage facility and added a robotic palletizer, both in 2005. In 1995, the facility achieved an ISO 9000 certification, a series of quality management systems standards confirmed by an independent, third-party auditor.

Pioneer has 26 commercial seed corn processing facilities in North America, including five parent seed operations. In addition to Rushville, the company has four corn plants in Indiana, including those at Plymouth, Tipton and Worthington. Pioneer also operates a soybean facility at Tipton and a soybean parent seed plant at Mt. Vernon. Wheat is also grown at Mt. Vernon, Tipton and Worthington.