A new 22,000-square-foot facility off Industrial Way in Pasco will help a global agtech company continue moving “into the future,” an official said.

Syngenta, which is headquartered in Switzerland and has about 30,000 employees in 90 countries, recently celebrated the opening of a $15 million addition to its Pasco operation.

The facility came online in July and is used to process, treat and pack vegetable seeds.

The company already had a roughly 200,000-square-foot processing facility at the site, but the new facility focuses on small seeds, from cauliflower to watermelon.

“We serve the global agriculture industry from this site,” said Casey Young, a regional processing manager for Syngenta who’s based in Pasco.

Seeds to market

The Pasco site handles about 2 million kilograms of seeds a year, with capacity for about 3.2 million, Young said. Seeds aren’t grown there; instead, they’re cleaned, sorted and packaged for customers around the world.

When the seeds arrive, they “might have pieces of rind, broken seed stems, they might have a little dirt, those kinds of things. We clean all that up so we have a nice, good seed, and then we sell it into the market to our customers,” Young said.

In all, about 56 people work at the Pasco site full time, with three brought on because of the expansion, Young said. The new facility currently has five lines for processing seeds, with room for adding more down the road.

Young and other Syngenta leaders, partners and community officials gathered on Aug. 9 to celebrate the opening of the facility. Young told the crowd that the small-seed processing facility will help the company continue moving into the future.

He added in an interview with the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business that the new state-of-the-art facility with all-new equipment and innovative design means “we can get seeds through the facility faster and get them to our growers quicker.”

The global agtech company Syngenta has opened a 22,000-square-foot vegetable seed processing facility in Pasco. The new facility has five lines for processing seeds, with room for more in the future.

| Photo courtesy Scott Butner

Syngenta opened the original Pasco facility in 2009 and handled both large and small seeds there for years. But the need for a separate small-seed operation emerged.

“A simple example is, sweet corn or peas are very large seeds, the volumes are very large, the equipment is very large and there’s a huge flow of volume through the plant. It’s a really important part of our business,” said Matthew Johnston, the Boise-based global head of vegetable seeds and flowers for Syngenta. But smaller seeds have different volumes, needs and requirements, so “separating the two plants makes a lot of sense,” he said.

Importance of Pasco plant

Johnston said the Pasco site – and the greater Mid-Columbia region – is strategically important to Syngenta.

“We’ve been here for many years. It’s a really good location for lots of reasons, including the very high-quality workforce and talent in the region,” he said.

He said Syngenta aims to continue adding value to the Tri-Cities. “We want to be good stewards of the area. We think we have a very high-quality business that provides employment opportunities and also is a good neighbor for the community,” he said.

The Syngenta site is at 5516 Industrial Way.

Andersen Construction was the contractor for the new addition and Hummel Architects handled design.