Sixty years after its creation, C.Vale is fulfilling a dream of its first associates. The cooperative inaugurated on November 7, the date of its anniversary, a soybean crushing facility with a processing capacity of 60,000 bags per day.
The 12-hectare facility is located at the cooperative’s agro-industrial complex and received more than R$1 billion (USD 205 million) in investments between 2021 and 2023. The facility is the third largest plant in Brazil in plants with only one production line and the first at the technological level. The construction took two years to complete and involved 1,100 employees from 35 companies.
The inauguration ceremony gathered six thousand guests, including the governor of Paraná, Ratinho Júnior, many politicians, financial institutions, suppliers and clients from Brazil and abroad, as well as associates and employees.
“It was dreaming big but with our feet on the ground, we lifted this crushing soy facility. We invested more than R$1 billion to produce soybean meal with high protein content and higher oil yield,” president of C.Vale, Alfredo Lang, said. He explained that the industry brings together technologies from Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Germany.
The facility includes integrated control of all stages of the process, from the arrival to the processing of soybeans. “We will have access to real-time performance indicators at the entrance and exit, such as moisture and protein,” Lang revealed.
The new facility will come online in 2024 to produce soybean meal and oil for feed manufactured by C.Vale itself. The cooperative has already agreed to sell the surplus production to third parties.
