Bulk bags for fertilizer

Bagging at the blend plant

Retail blend plants often fill bulk bags with a front-end loader. The bag hangs from a stand, the duffle top is held open, and the operator dumps a bucket from a weighed batch. Larger terminals use a fill station with a scale and a spout top, which keeps dust down and lands closer to a set weight.

Either way the bag sits on concrete next to a pile of salty, gritty product, and anything that nicks the fabric now shows up as a leak in the field later. Four loops sized for loader forks let the operator move it without sliding it across the floor.

Into the spreader, drill or tender

On the farm, a full bag hangs from a loader, telehandler or a tender's boom over the hopper, and the operator pulls the spout tie. A long spout with a cord the operator can reach from the ground saves climbing onto the machine. Some growers and custom applicators slit the bottom instead, which wastes the bag but empties it faster.

Specialty and micronutrient blends often go out in smaller bags, 1,000 lb or less, because the rate per acre is low and a part-used bag left at the field edge picks up rain.

Moisture, UV and caking

Urea, ammonium nitrate and many blends are hygroscopic: they pull water from humid air and set up hard. An uncoated bag lets that happen within days in a Gulf Coast summer. Coated fabric plus a liner, closed tight after filling, is the usual answer, and bags belong on pallets off a wet floor.

Sun is the other enemy. Bags left in a yard or at the edge of a field through a season take UV damage; the fabric softens and powders on the surface, and the maker's guidance is not to lift a bag after prolonged sun exposure. Ask for UV-stabilized fabric if bags will be stored outside, and use them in the order they arrived.

Two short seasons, and the terminals that feed them

Fertilizer moves in two hard pushes: spring, before and during planting, and fall, after harvest, when nitrogen and potash go down for the next crop. USDA ERS publishes fertilizer use, nitrogen, phosphate and potash, by crop and state for corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat, which is a fair guide to where demand sits. Nitrogen plants along the lower Mississippi in Louisiana and phosphate mining in Florida supply many of the terminals that bag it.

Bags have to be at the blend plant before the rush, not during it. A full trailer of bales in late winter is usually the cheaper way to buy, if there is dry storage; a second, smaller load tops up after the spring run.

Much bagged fertilizer passes through a farm cooperative or an independent retailer. Product arrives at a terminal by barge, rail hopper or truck, gets blended to a grower's prescription, and leaves on flatbeds, gooseneck trailers or the grower's own pickup. The bag may be handled four or five times between the fill station and the field, each time by somebody different: a yard hand, a trucker, a farmhand on a skid steer. Every handoff is a chance to tear a loop or puncture a corner, so a sturdier fabric weight usually costs less than the product lost from one split bag.

Barge-fed terminals along the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers stock up while the water is open, before ice or low water can interrupt traffic. A sudden barge arrival can mean bagging around the clock for a few days, so those yards keep a cushion of empties on hand.

Small specialty lots, such as zinc or boron for a few fields or sulfur for alfalfa, are easier to handle in smaller bags that a compact tractor can lift.

Writing up a fertilizer bag order

Tell us the products you bag, the fill weight, whether you fill with a loader or a scale station, and how growers empty them. Note any bags that will be stored outdoors, any ammonium nitrate grade, and the print or lot tag you need for traceability. Then give us the ZIP and how many bags you run in a season, and we'll split the deliveries around spring and fall.

Where we ship fertilizer bags most

• Iowa
• Illinois
• Nebraska
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Florida