And unlike many country elevators, Cargill typically doesn’t have to dry corn, processing it before it can spoil. The Dayton facility therefore can accept corn with a moisture level of up to 23 percent, said Pat Kroger, merchandising manager at Cargill’s Dayton plant. Many country elevators dry their corn down to about 15 percent moisture so it can be stored for weeks or months. That can slow down their intake in years — like this one — when corn hasn’t fully dried in the fields.
But this year’s bin-busting harvest forced even Cargill to limit its intake for half a day to a day per week for about three weeks in November, Kroger said.
“We really haven’t experienced this volume before,” Kroger said. “For our draw area, it’s more bushels than we’ve seen in the past.”
For the past six weeks, many country elevators have been dealing with a big backlog of corn, the result of a record-breaking harvest, much of which has had to be dried, said Bob Linkhorn, president of Limaco in Urbana, which works with grain elevators in Ohio and Indiana.
Even grain handlers that ship corn down the Ohio River to New Orleans by barge were hit hard by the glut before Thanksgiving.
“It’s an abnormality,” Linkhorn said. “What we’re struggling with now is a bonus, stuff we normally wouldn’t have.”
Many farmers have added to their on-farm grain storage in recent years, and it will behoove them to continue doing so, said Dwayne Siekman, executive director of the Ohio Corn Growers Association.
“The industry is going to be taking a look at storage capacity, as yields are projected to continually increase,” Siekman said.
Adding storage can be expensive, though. A typical “farm duty” grain dryer, including installation but not concrete foundations or electrical or fuel connections, would cost $175,000 to $220,000, said Tyeis Baker-Baumann, president of Rebsco, Inc. in Greenville, which serves the grain-handling industry. A commercial-sized dryer that might be installed at a grain elevator can cost even more: $290,000 to $350,000, she said.
Because the area usually doesn’t have concerns about excessive moisture at harvest, many farmers and grain elevators choose to get by with older dryer systems, she said.
The inconveniences of the harvest are behind most farmers now, but Linkhorn said there’s a lesson to keep in mind.
“When the good Lord blesses you with abundance, be thankful and have patience,” he said.
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