Across U.S. heavy industry, the project delivery model behind the largest capital builds has been the same for decades. An engineering, procurement and construction management firm designs the project, manages the bidding and oversees construction on the owner’s behalf, while the owner keeps direct contracts with every supplier and trade. In oil and gas, industrial manufacturing and mining, the model is known by its acronym: EPCM. The owner sees actual costs. The construction manager has no financial stake in what gets built.
That arrangement has been less visible in regional agricultural construction, where design-build contractors have long handled grain elevators, feed mills and fertilizer facilities under a single contract. But as ag construction projects scale into the $20 million to $50 million range, and as the volume of automation, rail integration and operational complexity built into each facility keeps climbing, a quieter shift is underway. More cooperative boards and privately held ag businesses are asking whether the construction model they have always used still gives them the oversight they need.
Some are finding their answer in EPCM.
Roots in Industry and Ag-Industrial
EPCM is not new. Industrial and ag-industrial sectors have used it for decades on projects too large and too complex to hand to a single design-build firm. Burns & McDonnell is delivering EPCM services on a soybean-crushing facility for Bartlett, a Savage Companies subsidiary, in Cherryvale, Kansas, with public reporting placing the project between $325 million and $400 million.
De Smet Engineers & Contractors brands itself as an agro-industrial integrator and has delivered more than 500 projects across 65 countries. Some are EPCM contracts, where the firm manages construction on the owner’s behalf. Others are full turnkey EPC contracts, where the firm performs the work itself.
Across process and heavy industrial construction, owners have been moving away from lump-sum EPC toward EPCM since the early 2020s. The shift was formalized by IChemE’s 2023 “Blue Book,” the first standard-form EPCM contract. Drivers include supply-chain volatility, contractor risk aversion and owner demand for cost transparency. The U.S. EPCM market reached an estimated $321 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly double by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence.
Until recently, those firms did not work at the scale of a regional cooperative or a country grain terminal. The price tag was wrong. But the model itself was always portable.
Why the Question Is Coming Up Now
Several pressures are converging on ag facility owners at once.
U.S. grain storage capacity is essentially flat. Total capacity rose just 0.1% in 2024 to 25.5 billion bushels, even as production grows, according to the American Farm Bureau. Mega-terminal construction is accelerating. Cooperative consolidation is creating regional operators with bigger capital budgets. Cooperative property, plant and equipment totaled $36.2 billion in 2023, up $1.8 billion in a single year, according to USDA Rural Development’s Agricultural Cooperative Statistics, 2023. Though this is not only a cooperative story, privately held ag businesses, including feed operations, processors and regional grain companies, are building at the same scale.
At the same time, what a modern ag facility has to do is changing. Automation, controls, scale systems, multisite inventory tech and rail logistics integration are no longer add-ons bolted on after the building goes up. They are part of the build itself, and they have to be designed in.
For a co-op board or an ag business owner, the stakes shift with that complexity. The internal construction departments that once translated technical decisions into business decisions have thinned out or disappeared.
“Often these are once-in-a-generation investments,” said Jim Gales, who managed construction operations inside a major cooperative system before founding Gales Design & Consulting, an EPCM firm focused on regional ag construction. “The board deserves someone in the room who has done this many times, who can translate the technical decisions into business decisions.”
What EPCM Actually Means in an Ag Context
For an ag audience, EPCM translates to three things the owner gets, and one structural thing that does not happen elsewhere on the project.
The firm leads engineering and design. It runs procurement, building the bid packages and evaluating vendors on the owner’s behalf, with all purchase orders issued in the owner’s name. It oversees construction from groundbreaking through turnover, including schedule management, quality assurance and cost control.
The structural difference: The firm does not perform the construction itself, and it does not sell equipment or materials. The construction manager’s only financial relationship to the project is the professional services contract for managing it.
EPCM Reaches Regional Ag Scale
Until recently, cooperatives and other ag businesses planning $20 million to $50 million builds had limited options. Industrial EPCM firms were structurally available but commercially out of reach. Design-build contractors handled most of the work by default. The EPCM model now operates at cooperative scale, bringing to ag what heavy industry already takes for granted: a firm with no construction work to protect, transparent costs without buried markups and an independent advocate working only for the owner.
Gales Design & Consulting is one such firm, operating as both an EPCM provider and an independent owner’s representative. The firm focuses on regional cooperatives and ag businesses planning grain terminals, feed mills and the multicomponent facility builds that have followed the consolidation wave. The Gales model is EPCM in practice: no construction crew to keep busy, no equipment to sell and early cost estimating that happens before owners commit to a budget, hire engineers or break ground.
Who Sits on the Owner’s Side
The clearest difference between EPCM and the design-build model that dominates ag construction is structural: who profits when construction costs go up, and who has nothing at stake when they come down.
“Construction management is like the fox watching the henhouse,” Gales said. “Construction management should be a third party. A construction manager who works for the general contractor plays a much different role than one who works for the owner.”
Under design-build, a single firm holds the engineering, procurement and construction work. The owner has one contract and one point of accountability, which is genuinely simpler. The trade-off is that the firm building the project is also the firm pricing it. When a change order arrives or a scope question lands, the same company answers from both sides of the table.
Under EPCM, the owner holds the contracts. The construction manager has no role in performing the work and no margin tied to its cost. A change order goes through the construction manager, who has no incentive to approve it. A bid that comes in high gets pushed back on, line by line, because the firm doing the pushing built the estimate in the first place.
The effect shows up in places most owners only see in hindsight. On a $20 million feed mill expansion at Glacial Plains Cooperative in De Graff, Minnesota, where Gales Design & Consulting served as EPCM, the project shifted mid-build when a longtime customer doubled its bird food orders. A redesign that could have derailed schedule and budget on a single-source contract was reworked in three weeks because the firm coordinating the design had no construction crew to keep busy and no margin to protect.
That kind of structural independence is what the EPCM model is built around. In ag, it is also what the model has lacked at the cooperative scale until recently.
Looking Ahead
Heavy industry adopted EPCM because projects grew too large and too complex to manage any other way. Agriculture is on the same trajectory now, just decades later. Facilities are bigger. Automation and integration are deeper. Capital exposure on a single project is higher than it has been in a generation.
The structural answer industrial owners landed on long ago is the one a growing number of cooperative boards and ag business owners are now examining for themselves: a project delivery model where an independent firm leads the project for the owner, from the first cost estimate through turnover.
For cooperatives and ag businesses planning the next wave of facility investment, the structural answer once reserved for heavy industry is now within reach.
Michelle Sandstrom is a writer covering the U.S. agricultural industry. She also has written on food and travel and runs a design, marketing and public relations consultancy. She can be reached at michellesandstrom.com, m@michellesandstrom.com or 469-770-3104.