I've almost talked myself out of this. If someone is reading this in the future here are some links to my other questions of the day and a description of how I do things now:

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=1227668&posts=33&start=1 

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=1227677&posts=22&start=1

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=1227690&posts=4&start=1

Say your perfect system costs $2.5M today. Has a leg, a dryer and 700K of storage (including the wet bin) and can both load and unload a semi in well under 10 minutes and you can blend to your heart's content. You pull the trigger and are miraculously able to get the entire thing setup for the 2026 fall harvest.

Let's further say you really maximize the use of it and you turn it twice during fall harvest meaning you fill it up, empty it and fill it again.

Let's say that system is worth $1.8M in 30 years (I think that is being very generous) and that you spend $500K in repairs over that 30 years plus all the energy to run stuff during that time period.

Now let's imagine a totally different path. You take that $2.5M and you invest it and you get 6% ROI for 30 years. Now you have $14.36M.

The difference between $14.36M and $1.8M is $12.56M

Add in $500K of repairs over that time period and you're over $13M

Add in $0.03 of electricity and natural gas over that time period (running 1.4M bushels through it a year because you're super aggressively running the system) and you have another $1.26M.

Call it $15M (not including your labor to run the thing and not including property taxes and not including insurance) over 30 years. And you ran 42M bushels through it during that time. That is $0.35 per bushel before property taxes and before your labor to manage it and hire people to operate it if you can't keep up with it yourself.

What happens when you run it like a normal person and only turn it once a year or maybe not even that much? You come close to doubling that $0.35/bushel.

For $0.60 or $0.70 a bushel I can take a lot of grain to town if I'm worried about not being able to start harvest soon enough...

What am I missing here? It makes me want to just stick with the lowly grain bagger.

I think if all of this stuff was about half the price that it seems to be then I think I'd be pretty interested. But I'm not so sure it's a slam dunk the way it is especially since I don't have access to an ideal site.

Edit: Coming to the conclusion that it's only justifiable for me if it truly results in more than a 4% increase in production. Started a thread on that topic in crop talk:

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=1227710&posts=1#M11533364