One of Dawson, Minnesota’s most popular gathering places is the Rusty Duck, and the menu has a lot to do with making it that.
Patrons appreciate its traditional Midwestern fare, everything from hot roast beef specials to barbecue ribs, steaks and burger baskets. Dawson is very much a traditional meat and potatoes community when it comes to food preferences, according to Jay Knoop, who helps serve up the Rusty Duck’s popular menu.
But Knoop said it’s not all meat and potatoes. Here in the heart of western Minnesota farm country, a veggie burger is also on the menu. Real meat burgers remain the most popular, but Knoop said the veggie burger does well.
How did an alternative meat burger find its way on the Rusty Duck’s menu? There is the matter of supporting one of the community’s largest employers.
PURIS Company has been processing pea protein in the former AMPI plant on the eastern edge of Dawson since October 2021. The plant employs more than 100 workers. The 200,000-square-foot facility with state-of-the-art processing equipment represents a more than $100 million investment as a partnership involving PURIS and Cargill .
Pea protein produced by PURIS makes its way into a wide range of food products, from high-energy bars and body-building mixes to alternative meat burgers.
“This is more than a pea protein facility,” PURIS President Tyler Lorenzen said in the companies’ joint news release announcing the big partnership. “This is the future of food.”
This is familiar territory for Dawson. This rural community of just over 1,400 people has been in the vanguard of plant-based protein production for more than half a century. In fact, the building that now houses PURIS in Dawson was originally constructed in the mid-1970s by Dawson Mills to extract protein from soybeans.
The history of the rise of plant-based meats and western Minnesota’s role in this still-evolving endeavor is the subject of an upcoming series being produced by Pioneer PBS for national broadcast. The West Central Tribune is participating in the venture. The first of the series will be available on Pioneer PBS by video streaming on Friday, March 17.
The first series will delve into the history of plant-based protein in Dawson. While it’s a story of being on the cutting edge in the food revolution, its origin story is a familiar one in rural Minnesota.
Being located far from the country’s major urban markets, Minnesota farmers have often received a lower price for their grains due to the shipping costs to get them to market. In response, Minnesota farmers have long focused on value-added processing.
That’s exactly what four Dawson area businessmen proposed over their morning coffee one day, according to David Craigmile, a retired Lac qui Parle County farmer and educator as well as local historian. He said the businessmen decided: “We need to have an ag processing-related business in the area.”
The Tri-County Cooperative started processing soybeans in 1951 and became Dawson Mills in 1969. It has since become part of a larger company, Ag Processing Inc., and continues to process soybeans in the heart of Dawson as the community’s largest employer.
Source:agweek.com
Categories: Minnesota, Crops, Soybeans, General, Livestock, Beef Cattle