Expansion continues at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry, where a $23 million upgraded wastewater treatment facility on the plant’s west side and new construction on the plant’s north side is now being complemented by eastward expansion for truck parking.
Representatives of the Tyson corporation first pitched a plan to the Dallas County Conservation Board in July 2016 for relocating a section of the Raccoon River Bike Trail (RRVT) as part of the hog processor’s expansion and reorganization of its Perry plant.
Phase one of the project, now complete, moved a section of the RRVT northward where it passed the plant’s north side. The second phase, now underway, entails buying or leasing county property east of the plant for use as semi-tractor trailer parking.
The 5.4 acres of woodland east of the slaughterhouse has an assessed value of $1,600, according to records of the Dallas County Assessor dated Nov. 8, 2017. Work crews were seen Friday clearing the land, which was formerly owned by the railroad.
“We’ve been hitting a lot of metal,” one of the workers said. “I already hit a few of those railroad plates with the spikes sticking up. That chipper don’t like metal.”
The worker said the area will eventually be paved, but first “hundreds of truckloads of rock” will be hauled in.
Moving the bike trail farther north gave semis room to back into the loading docks on the north side of the Tyson factory.
“They would be empty coming in,” Mike Grothe, plant manager of the Tyson Fresh Meats operation near Perry, told to Dallas County Conservation Board in 2016, “and they would back into these areas to load.”
A statement from Tyson Foods, the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork, said the Perry factory is “in the process of adding a 13,000-square-foot building expansion in order to adopt a modernized process for harvesting hogs. This expansion requires a truck turn-around area on the north side of the facility so that outgoing trucks could access the facilities loadout areas.”
The new $23 million upgrade to Tyson’s wastewater treatment plant is apparently complete. The company said the new wastewater facility has “the latest wastewater treatment technology. The project will provide additional treatment capacity to meet future requirements.”
Suresh Kumar and Thabit Hamoud, environmental engineers with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said Tyson was “very proactive” in upgrading its Perry wastewater treatment plant starting in 2013, about five years sooner than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations would have required it.
Kumar said the Perry facility uses “some new, advanced processes,” including “construction of a new anoxic basin, conversion of the existing aerobic digester tank to an activated sludge process aeration basin, construction of a new aeration basin, construction of a new clarifier and the installation of a new ferric chloride and polymer chemical feed system.”
Kumar said the upgrade in the Perry plant was needed because “production is going up.”
The loss of woods on a railroad brownfield is not apt to remind many Perry residents of the plaintive lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Binsey Poplars,” which laments the loss of a “sweet especial rural scene.” Locals might be more likely to regret the greater visibility the lost trees give to the backside of Billy’s Sales and Salvage LLC.
Iowans also seemed generally accustomed to ignoring or dismissing Hopkins’ broader warning: “O if we but knew what we do / When we delve or hew — / Hack and rack the growing green!”
One thing will never change no matter how scenic or not the bike trail and general location are: the offensive smell will still remain. I’d go Vegan if I didn’t love bacon so much. We Iowans have become “nose-blind” to one extent or another. Still, it sometimes can be very unpleasant for even us.
We noticed the odor of prosperity was particularly strong Saturday morning.
“I’d go Vegan if I didn’t love bacon so much.” That is an odd thing to say. It takes a lot of discipline, purposefulness, and self-reflection to live as a vegan. Your comment suggests you are an unlikely candidate. You are right about the smell. Perry does smell bad much of the time. I’m surprised residents are so tolerant of this unpleasantness and all the other negative impacts.
Good article. Thanks.