Ballance Agri-Nutrients

Situation

Ballance Agri-Nutrients is a co-operative organisation owned by Kiwi farmers. Its purpose is to help customers farm more productively, profitably and sustainably through providing fertilisers that will help achieve soil and animal nutrition and productivity with minimal environmental footprint.

One area of their business is distribution of fertiliser to farms throughout New Zealand. Ballance has service centres and dedicated facilities for the storage and redistribution of fertiliser in some 39 locations across the country.

To enhance their distribution operations, Ballance decided to open another service facility in the Waikato region. Finding an empty location in Huntly, a new service facility had to be built from scratch, consisting of an office and a fertiliser storage.

With a plan to store large bulks of fertiliser, Ballance planned to build a 42m x 60m storage building. A key requirement is for the storage to have strong walls that will stand the weight of bulk fertiliser.

Solution

The solution for Ballance’s fertiliser storage is provided by Interbloc’s Modular Wall System. The heavy-duty, interlocking blocks and their unique, engineered design provided the storage with durable and stable walls. The blocks’ design creates shear strength on all directions of the blocks which stops the storage walls from moving.

For extra stability, the blocks were also reinforced using threaded bars, inserted through the blocks, to the thick concrete pad of the building.

Benefits

Apart from the stability and durability provided by the Interbloc Modular Wall System, Ballance obtained extra benefits for using Interbloc.

The LEGO-like quality of Interbloc’s interlocking blocks allowed for the walls to be quickly and easily set up. The entire wall structures of over 600 blocks was built within two weeks, requiring minimal labour.

Ballance was also able to reduce their environmental footprint by using Interbloc’s Modular Wall system. Interbloc as a scheme supporter of the Envirocon Product Stewardship scheme provided Ballance with environmentally sustainable products.