At the Royster-Clark Inc. fertilizer plant in Madison, Wis., the plant manager raises an inspection hatch on a product mixer and dips his hand into a stream of cascading granules. He inspects the material closely, looking at the color and consistency, rolling the granules between his fingers to check their texture, then smiles and holds his hand out for others to see the material.
"That's a good product;" he says enthusiastically. "We can sell that."
At the far end of the ...