FAIRFIELD – The buildings at Reiff Grain on the north side of Fairfield are being taken down, but they’re not headed to a landfill.

The buildings, such as its silos, elevator, and storage facilities, are being recycled. Melvin Bontrager, a concrete contractor and farmer from Kalona, is recycling the steel from the buildings as they are torn down. Martin Brett of Vastu Partners LLC purchased Reiff Grain and is turning the land into a housing development called North Campus Ridge, adjacent to his other housing development North Campus Village.

“Dave called around and found an Amish contractor [Melvin Bontrager], and he wanted those buildings for the farm community, to take them down and reconstruct them up there,” Brett said. “They take the steel skin to the scrap yard and get about $150 per ton. It’s a lot of work to take that stuff down, and they’re unbelievable workers. They took every bolt, and there were thousands of bolts, to get the steel skin off.”

As of Wednesday morning, Aug. 21, four of the Reiff Grain steel buildings have come down, including one shop and three grain storage facilities. Brett said the concrete in the buildings will be ground up, and then a magnet will remove the rebar from it. The resulting ground up concrete pieces will be used for the base of the gravel roads in North Campus Ridge.

Brett said a few of the small steel silos will be cut in half vertically and moved to a new location, perhaps to be used as a Quonset building. The big concrete silo on the south side will be knocked over and ground up for road base.

“Anything steel that is left after September 1 will go to the scrapyard in Lockridge,” Brett said.

Brett said that ever since word got out that he is able to recycle the buildings at Reiff Grain, he’s gotten a lot of positive comments and questions from the public. He said he’s gotten more comments about the recycling than about his housing development. He also credits Reiff for being so committed to reusing as much material as possible and not throwing something away just because it’s old.

In the summer of 2023, Brett announced that he was seeking a Brownfields Cleanup Grant for a parcel of land that included Reiff Grain on North Highway 1. If the grant came through, it would give Brett between $900,000 and $1 million to demolish all the buildings at Reiff Grain and begin construction on a new housing complex that would be called North Campus Ridge. In December, Brett learned that the grant came through, and Reiff agreed to sell the land. The business closed this year after 50 years of operation.

The North Campus Ridge housing development is a joint venture between Vastu Partners LLC and Doug Bachar of DRB Contracting.