Mill goes against the Eugene grain.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the sixth in a monthly, 10-part series about what goes on inside various local businesses. Today, Grain Millers in Eugene.

It's not that Eugene is steeped in urban sophistication, wall-to-wall in glass and steel. Still, you're zipping along Interstate 105 and see the cluster of silos just to the west and wonder what other medium-size city has a grain mill within a mile of its downtown core?

Imagine: a giant grain mill in Eugene, a place whose agricultural prowess is better expressed in, say, the Tuesday Farmers Market than in a national company down the street that quietly goes head-to-head with Quaker Oats.

It's ironic because some wonder whether the place is even in business.

"I hear that question all the time," says Will Shaver, the company's senior software engineer. "Odd, because you can smell the oats and see trucks leaving all the time."

If a bit of a mystery, Grain Millers is also a bit of an anomaly, this 20-silo mill that rises out of seemingly nowhere, next to the Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge. Grain Millers' flag-bedecked peak tops out at 135 feet, making the mill a capital letter in an eclectic area of town that's decidedly lower case.

On one corner: Buckley Center, a detoxification and sobriety place. Next door, on Madison between Third and Fourth avenues: a grain mill that regularly receives trainloads of raw oats and sends out 12 to 15 semi-truckloads of product every weekday.

In terms of volume, the company is the No. 2 manufacturer of oats in America.

So what is this place and what's it doing here in Eugene instead of on the outskirts of, say, Des Moines?

For the most part, Grain Millers takes oats grown in - and shipped by train from - Canada and turns them into flakes, flours and brans that are trucked to major natural food-producing companies in the Western United States and Canada. Examples: Nestle's, Orowheat Bread and Golden Temple, another Eugene company.

`If you're eating oatmeal somewhere on the West Coast and it doesn't say `Quaker' on it, chances are it came from us,' says Shaver, whose sophisticated computer programs help balance the otherwise blue-collar-feel of this place.

But why here? Why Eugene?

Because back in the '80s, Christian Kongsore Sr. of Seattle realized consumer demand for oats was growing, and yet virtually no West Coast mill had a piece of the action. When he found a built-in-the-'40s feed mill in Eugene - railroad tracks on its back porch - he launched Grain Millers.

His son, Christian Jr., now serves as president of West Coast operations, his office tucked in a second-story corner of the Eugene plant.

Grain Millers has two other mills, one in Iowa and one in Saskatchewan, Canada. Corporate offices are in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Here at home, you walk in the door and realize this is a substance, not style, place.

The "lobby" includes a pop machine, a copy machine and, on this day, a hand truck. You need to go up a flight of concrete stairs just to get to the offices, where about 15 of the 100 employees work, about 35 at any given time.

Cozy. Workable. Unpretentious. The product around here, after all, isn't Caribbean cruises or million-dollar motor homes but grains, mainly oats. And oats don't earn many glamour points in the agronomy world, lacking the luster of, say, corn or strawberries.

"Let's face it, they're the stepsister of agricultural commodities," says Robert Serrano, vice president of technical services.

They tend to be grown on land that isn't good for growing much of anything else, which brings us to western Canada, where Grain Millers gets its raw product.

Arriving at Grain Millers, the train cars of oats are emptied, from the bottom, into a pit beneath the tracks. A conveyor shoves the oats sideways, then bucket elevators take the grain to the tops of the 20 silos.

From there, gravity takes over, saving all sorts of time and effort because the product moves from step to step through downward chutes.

En route downward, they're cleaned, classified, de-hulled, kilned, flattened - you name it. A machine called the "flaker" - two giant rollers - squeezes the oats into the flakes that'll become your oatmeal, for example.

"It's really ancient technology, only run with electricity instead of water," Shaver says. "The processing and cleaning is done mechanically, not chemically."

Workers travel up and down the 10-story plant by more cumbersome means - cramped stairs or an unenclosed elevator that gave me the heebie jeebies. It's a little like a dumbwaiter for humans. No thanks.

Once at ground level, the grains are packaged in bags, placed on totes and shipped out, about 140 tons a day. From cereals and pancake mixes to Scottish oatmeal and flours.

On my tour, it was a toss-up about what was coolest: the view from the top is stunning. But, then, it was neat to see "Johnny 5," a robotic "palletizer," foul up when grabbing a sack of oats and spill it. Reminded me that machines can be as flawed as we humans.

Crews work 24/7 in what's a fairly dim, noisy atmosphere; machines shake, whir and blow.

And nearly everything's coated with what looks like a skiff of snow but is just oats dust.

It's all part of an operation that goes on day in and day out in a most unlikely place. Or maybe it's just that outsiders think this is an unlikely place.

After all, 40 percent of the company's product is organically certified. And what could be more Eugene than that?

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at bwelch@ guardnet.com.