Many ag leaders have expressed concerns about President Trump’s tariff strategy impacting U.S. grain and livestock producers. The 50-percent tariffs that the Trump administration have recently imposed on steel and aluminum are also impacting the construction of a new bioplastics manufacturing facility in Knox County.
“Obviously, nobody budgets for a 50-percent increase in costs on a piece of equipment, and we’re in that boat right now,” says Brian Southern, Founder and CEO of AgroRenew, which is building a new 196,000-square-foot plant just south of Vincennes in the U.S. 41 Industrial Park.
The company plans to take waste from watermelons, cantaloupes and pumpkins and turn them into biodegradable plastics. AgroRenew was founded in 2023 by Brian and his wife Katie when they both discovered that watermelons had the chemical properties that allowed it to be converted into biodegradable plastics.
However, Southern tells Hoosier Ag Today that the day-to-day uncertainty of the tariffs is having an impact on his building plan.
“Since the early part of this year, we’ve been dealing with different types of on-again off-again tariffs,” he says. “Most recently, some of the tariffs are impacting our ability to get access to building materials. It’s made our supply chain kind of nervous when it comes to whether or not we going to have a tariff. That has impacted our ability to get confirming dates on when equipment can arrive.”
If President Trump allows his 50-percent tariffs on steel to continue long-term, Southern says it will significantly increase the costs that he and his team have already budgeted for construction. He adds that the steel that is manufactured in the U.S. doesn’t always originate from here in the U.S.
“The industrial manufacturing world is a global economy. It’s not unique to a specific country,” he says. “When it comes to the tariffs on the steel, there are a lot of companies here in the U.S. that depend on getting steel from multiple sources. When you cut off the supply from other places, it impacts the supply chain.”
Fortunately, Southern says he still expects AgroRenew’s new production facility to be finished by the end of next summer to coincide with harvest in 2026.
“We don’t believe long-term that’s it’s going to have an impact on the finish date for the construction of the building,” says Southern. “It’s just delaying when we start a few things to make sure that our deliveries for equipment and the deliveries for the construction materials and the build out all kind of align to be culminating at the same time. It doesn’t do us any good to have equipment showing up and not have a finished building—or, it’s not productive for us to complete a new building and not have the process equipment to put inside it.”
The original budget for AgroRenew’s new production facility was $83 million. However, Southern says he’s been able to bring the costs down to $79 million before President Trump’s tariff plan was imposed.
AgroRenew plans to provide more than 250 career opportunities once the new production facility is open and operational.
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