Dr. Emerson D. Nafziger, Crop Sciences, University of Illinois, reports: " The early 1940's would have been early in the adoption of soybean as a commercial cash crop, and so acreage in the Midwest would have been starting to grow, but it was probably not very high. I suspect this might have been the only soybean processing mill in KS at the time, or it was surely one of the few. South central KS and eastern KS (with higher rainfall) were probably the where most of the crop was grown, so I would assume that most of the soybeans might have come into Emporia from other places in KS. No nearby state would have had huge surpluses at the time, though the market for soy oil and meal was only starting to grow, so there were probably few processors."

"Soybeans are about 20 percent oil, and each bushel (60 lb) would produce about 12 LB of oil, which is just under two gallons. On a volume basis, a bushel is about 1.25 cubic ft and at 7 LB per gallon (a guess - I can't lay my hands on the actual density) the oil from a bushel would occupy about a fourth of a cubic foot, so the ratio of whole soy volume to extracted oil volume would be about 5.4 to 1. Most of the rest of the product from an extraction plant would be soybean meal, which because it is crushed would probably be denser than whole soybeans, and reduced to about 75 percent of its initial weight be removal of the hull and oil. Hull, at something like 3 or 4 percent (?) would have been hauled away, but I'm not sure what use would have been made of it."

"Without knowing the capacity of the mill at the time in question it will be difficult to guess at the rates of feedstock and product movement. I note that the silo cluster was added after the time you refer to, and it appears that storage capacity was then quite small. That means that there would have had to be pretty constant movement on the tracks to keep the mill supplied. Today, there's likely a lot of truck haul-in, but in 1943 there was probably very little."

Mark Amfahr added, "A modern soybean crushing operation produces (for every 100 tons of soybeans crushed) roughly 75 tons of soybean meal, 18 tons of soybean oil, and 7 tons of other products, such as hulls, etc. Except for the truck shipments, the meal and other dry products go out by covered hopper while the oil leaves the plant in tank cars. If I had to guess, I'd say that 1950's operations would have been similar except for a smaller % of oil output vs. today. Dry products would have probably left mostly in boxcars while oil would have been shipped either in tank cars or as a packaged product in boxcars."

Larry Jackman added, "You will also need inbound tank cars of H2SO4 acid. They use that to extract the oil from the beans."

Based on the above, 1950s operations would look something like this. 10 box cars of soybeans would enter the plant (1,000 tons) from the west. Once processed, 6 8,000 gal. tank cars of oil, 7 boxcars of meal, and 1 boxcar of hulls would be loaded for removal. The oil would probably head east, while the meal was used largely for cattle feed and could go any direction. No one has explained the use for the hulls yet. I am uncertain of the H2SO4 required for this operation, but I expect it to be minimal.