All the talk about biodiesel centers on how the fledgling industry might boost U.S. agriculture or make the nation’s energy supply more secure. But there’s at least one more thing to consider: Somebody has to build all of those production plants.

That’s where The Bratney Cos. enters the picture. Founded in 1964 by Ken Bratney, this privately owned company has made a place for itself by designing and building various types of plants dealing with grain processing. And now, said his son and company President Paul Bratney, “biodiesel is going to be a huge deal for us.”

Continued growth of the young biodiesel industry could produce significant income for the Urbandale company, which already is on track to collect more than $60 million in revenues this year. Bratney expects revenues to increase by 50 percent in 2007.

Ken Bratney, now retired, received a degree in engineering at the University of Iowa, went back to his roots in Portland, Ore., then returned to the Midwest for a business partnership opportunity in Illinois. “He borrowed on a life insurance policy to buy an airplane ticket,” his son said. When that didn’t work out, the family wound up in Des Moines.

Bratney started his company in 1964 as a manufacturers’ representative, operating out of the basement of his house and enlisting his five children as phone answerers. Paul Bratney went to Montana State University to earn an engineering degree. “When I came back in 1977, it was probably a 10-man organization,” he said.

The company specialized in building hybrid seed corn plants because “nobody else was doing it” except for the major hybrid producers. Bratney said.

Eventually, the push for ethanol began to have an impact. “In the first 25 years of this company, there probably weren’t more than one or two ethanol projects valued at more than $40 million in the state of Iowa,” Bratney said. “In the last five years, there have been 40 of them.”

His company has worked on seven ethanol plants and is under contract for three more. That hasn’t been just in-state business; Bratney Cos. has gone as far as Oregon and California to construct ethanol plants.

Now the biodiesel wave is rolling, and Bratney Cos. has contracts to design and build seven facilities to produce that fuel. Each project is a 14- to 16-month process. Specialized crews travel from site to site, hiring construction workers at each location.

“Bankers say it’s risky to invest in biodiesel,” Bratney noted, “but there’s 400 million gallons of capacity up and running, and we’re bringing a German technology to the marketplace that has been operating in Germany for many years.”

Bratney Cos. imports some of the necessary equipment from a company in Denmark. That company, in turn, bought a company that built the first biodiesel plant in Germany. Bratney travels to Denmark with a few associates once a year for sales meetings.

In addition to its design/build function, Bratney Cos. derives about a third of its business working as a manufacturer’s representative for grain handling and processing equipment. “We deal with hundreds of companies and have strong corporate relationships with half a dozen,” Bratney said.

The company pulled back from an aggressive international expansion a few years ago, but employs a few people in South America and has engineers working in three countries. It employs 12 outside salesmen who work “from Washington [state} to Ohio and everywhere in between,” Bratney said.

The company has more than 150 employees, spread among several locations. Paul Bratney leads a 40-employee contingent in Urbandale. His brother, Bruce, is in charge of a 15-person office in Boise, Idaho. Their father now serves as chairman of the board.

Ethanol and biodiesel hold potential for company growth, but the traditional agricultural commodities still drive its success. “We’ve explored different opportunities, and as some branches of the tree would wilt, we have put resources somewhere else,” Bratney said. “But year after year, our core business is the seed business.”

In that sense, the company hasn’t changed drastically over the years.

“It’s a great, great, great country to be in this business,” Bratney said. “We feed the world, and people are going to eat every day.”