The article below appeared in yesterday's Charleston Daily Mail. It's good news for the Kanawha Valley.

Chemical manufacturer planning to hire
'During the next four or five years we believe that between us we could be recruiting 50 to 100 workers a year, just to maintain what we've got'

by George Hohmann
Daily Mail Business Editor

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Increasing demand for a reformulated Bayer CropScience insecticide is prompting the company to add 24 good-paying jobs at Institute, said site leader Nick Crosby.

Bayer CropScience began running an advertisement for workers in Sunday's Gazette-Mail.

WorkForce West Virginia, formerly known as the state Bureau of Employment Programs, will take job applications and schedule testing on behalf of Bayer CropScience from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. next Monday through Thursday at the Cole Complex on the campus of West Virginia State Community and Technical College, Institute.

Applications will only be taken at the college, with one exception: out-of-state applicants may submit resumes by e-mailing the company at Institute...@bayercropscience.com.

Bayer CropScience is looking to hire 20 chemical process operators and four maintenance people.
The pay is about $24 an hour plus benefits, Crosby said.

The jobs are the direct result of demand for an insecticide with the trade name Larvin. "It's not a new product," Crosby said. "It's a revival of a product made on site here for a number of years. It was nearing the end of its useful life around 2003, 2004. But there's been a reformulation of the active ingredient with another active ingredient Bayer produces and remarketed as a seed-treatment product, predominantly in Brazil.

"What has happened is, the demand for this product is so great - it has found a new life, a new market niche," Crosby said.

Bayer's Institute site has historically operated two production units part-time to make Larvin, he said. One unit was operated half a year to make an intermediate product and then shut down. The other unit was then operated the other half of the year to convert the intermediate into the finished product. "Now we're going to run these two units parallel," he said.

"We're also investing around $3.5 million de-bottlenecking the second unit," Crosby said.
The changes will result in about a 40 percent increase in overall capacity.

"All that results in some more jobs," he said. "They're predominantly focused on that unit. But the whole agriculture industry at the moment is seeing an upturn. Even though we are into a recession, the agriculture industry is pretty buoyant at the moment. It's driven by several factors: Higher commodity prices, which are in part due to the fact that folks in the far East are changing their diets; and the increased demand for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel. There's competition between feed and fuel."