Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Manufacturing in Sioux County

Des Moines Register:
Orange City is Sioux County’s charmer, with quaint shopfronts, tulips, windmills and bright orange water towers. Rock Valley is the workhorse, the town that wears work boots and blue-collar shirts smeared with grease.
U.S. Highway 18 cuts through town from east to west, and machine shops line the road. Roughly 1,200 machinists, welders, shop foremen, press breakmen and laser cutters clock in every day, throw on a pair of safety glasses and churn out parts for tractors, skid loaders and crane booms. The town’s entire population is 3,000.
“Rock Valley is a manufacturing town,” said Cal de Ruyter, co-founder of Siouxland Machine and Fabrication. “Our customer is the world.”
The more I read about Sioux County, the more it sounds like Mercer County, Ohio.  I don't expect the ag boom to last like a lot of folks do, so I wouldn't be surprised to see both places feel real pain if the commodity bubble bursts.

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