Five years after powering up a small-capacity machine to enter masonry unit production, Sims Stone - Landscape Concrete Products is thinking bigger.

The producer ushered in spring 2001 by opening a new plant, furnished with high conveyor and bin storage capacity; a Hess Multimat RH 2000 machine; and extensive product transfer, finishing and cubing assemblies. The operation lies on a 55-acre site in Tuscumbia, Ala. It is the latest addition to a complex of material storage, handling and processing facilities that support the main output — bagged and bulk topsoil, gravel, bark, tinted wood chips and other lawn and garden products — of a flagship business, Sims Bark Co.

Sitting in the Shoals region of Alabama's northwest corner, the property is strategic to the main population centers of Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., along with Nashville and Memphis, Tenn. Sims' 33-acre satellite soil and bark bagging operation in Olive Branch, Miss., just across the Tennessee border from Memphis, affords access to Arkansas customers.

The arrival of high-output concrete masonry machinery enables Sims Stone to deliver a wider range of segmental retaining wall (SRW), paving stones, edge stone and conventional block. The producer's original concrete equipment, a Fleming Eagle, is set up separate from the new plant — amid lawn and garden bagging lines — and turns mostly 2-in. patio stones. In all, Sims Stone can offer dry cast concrete landscape units in 60-plus shapes and colors. Among those are Rockwood Retaining Walls-licensed 6-in. and 8-in. SRW, Cottage Stone and Stone Skirt.

Line extension

A 1996 entry in concrete came more than two decades after the Sims family — accustomed to little competition before suddenly facing K mart and Wal-Mart — abandoned its nursery business (note Editorial, page 4) in favor of lawn and garden products. As they mapped a new family-business plan, the Sims were destined to see past foes become future friends.

Concrete masonry has proved a profitable means of extending product offerings to big box retailers, who remain primary lawn and garden customers. Sims Bark President David Sims notes that landscape units allow the company to create more optimal merchandise mixes for those accounts, who fervently manage inventory on a just-in-time basis.

As the Hess RH 2000 is tweaked to a point at or near full output, it will run in tandem with the seven-day-a-week schedule of Sims Bark's lawn and garden processing, shreading and packaging lines. Such capacity will enable Sims Stone to integrate concrete units into lawn and garden programs for retailers throughout its five-state market area. Volume and product variety afforded by the new plant will also allow diversification of Sims' concrete customer base, with nonresidential SRW applications showing particular potential.