It was a big day Wednesday for farmer investors involved in the Genesis Grain and Fertilizer Project.

Officials were on hand at the future site of the SuperCenter for the official sod-turning.

Director Barrie Mann says the 52,000 tonne state of the art storage facility is going to be a real game changer for farmers.

"We have over 700 farmers that have directly invested into the building of this facility, of course we hope to build a few more across the prairies but this is number one here at Belle Plaine sitting on both railways. It's just going to work extremely well for us, it's a long time coming but definitely we believe it's going to be a huge game changer."

He says site preparation gets underway this week, construction should take about nine months adding they should be ready to go for the Spring of 2018.

Chris Vanderstoel farms at Pense and talks about why he invested in the project.

"It's important I think for the farmers to have some market share in the fertilizer industry, there's too many big players that are claiming the profits and we just have to be able to be in control of that a little bit to."

The facility will have the ability to unload rail cars at 600 tonnes/hour and load eight Super B's to be loaded an hour as well.

The total cost of the project is $25 million.