It’s just sitting there: a lonely plot of more than 400 acres on the east side of Lawrence with a shut-down factory in the middle.

What will become of the land, formerly a fertilizer plant owned by bankrupt Farmland Industries of Kansas City, Mo., is one of the factors that will shape Lawrence’s development in coming years.

At play:

l On the north side of Kansas Highway 10 lies the closed plant itself, which stopped operations in May 2001.

l Surrounding the plant on the north side is about 160 acres of “buffer ground.”

l On the south side of K-10 lie 180 acres of “buffer ground”, the patch of land considered the most prime for commercial development.

“There’s definitely a lot of interest in it,” said Doug Young, an agent with Farmland’s Ceres Realty Corp.

For a while, the company said it would only sell the open acres around the plant if it could find someone who wanted to buy the factory itself.

But the option of re-opening the plant appeared to rust in February, when Wichita-based Koch Nitrogen Co. made an offer on the bulk of Farmland’s fertilizer operations nationwide but excluded the Lawrence plant.

Land owned by Farmland Industries at O'Connell Road and Kansas Highway 10 remains for sale.

It’s still possible that an industrial user will want to buy the plant in an auction in late March that’s part of federal bankruptcy proceedings.

“Until that auction is complete, we won’t know,” spokeswoman Sherlyn Manson said.

If Farmland fails to get a buyer for the actual plant, it likely will remove the plant, tear down the equipment, clear the ground and make it available for development.

A word of caution: The plant has been churning with chemicals for decades.

“Lawrence is an old plant, and in the industry it is reported that it has some environmental problems, and nobody wants to touch it because of that,” said John Douglas of Douglas Associates, an Alabama-based consulting firm for the fertilizer industry.

The buffer ground north of K-10 has been mentioned as a possible expansion site for the Douglas County 4-H Fairgrounds.

Also, county and city officials are considering buying the plant grounds and helping develop it for an industrial park or other uses.

“We need to decide if the city and county need to intervene,” Douglas County Commissioner Charles Jones said. “Our biggest fear is the old plant could sit there for years and years and not generate any taxes for the community.”

Staff writer Joel Mathis and business editor Chad Lawhorn contributed information to this article.