Carolina Eastern-Vail, CaroVail, located at 53 Columbus Street, Auburn, NY has a long history in the Agricultural Industry of Cayuga County. This location has been the site of the General League of Farmer’s feed mill in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. It continued to be in the center of Cayuga County agriculture with Agway having a large farm supply business here in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and into the 21st century. [Click Here for 2-min Video Feature]
CaroVail recognized the agricultural vitality of Cayuga County and purchased the property, as it was left, by Agway in 2005. Today they deliver various crop growing materials to many of the local and regional farmers.
CaroVail has a long standing working relationship with the Finger Lakes Railway which includes the stationing of one remote control locomotive and an engineer/conductor that uses the property as a reporting station. Due to the onsite rail infrastructure, fertilizer is brought onto the site in railcars from as far away as Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico, and the Canadian Providences of Saskatchewan and British Columbia. These fertilizers are sold retail to local farmers or at a nominal fee to other fertilizer dealers in Cayuga, and surrounding counties.
Current average annual rail traffic is approximately 100 cars while the anticipated rail usage will be about 120 cars in 2010 with annual usage potentially reaching in excess of 200 cars. “If we convert our railed-in products to truck delivery we will not be able to efficiently supply local farms with competitively priced supplies to grow crops,” says CaroVail Manager, Cliff Love. “This will not only affect this one facility in Auburn but it will also affect the other affiliate fertilizer dealers that rely on rail delivered fertilizer.”
If delivered by truck, the same amount of fertilizer would result in approximately 5.4 million miles of added truck freight in order to supply current product needs at the Auburn facility. It would also result in approximately 340 trucks coming into the city of Auburn to deliver this product.
