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North Central Indiana | We aren’t in your boat exactly, we have a pretty nice facility already but we’re also mulling some major changes like you. We have ~250,000 bushels of storage at the main farm, a 5500 bph wet leg, 5300 bph pit conveyor, 9000 bushel wet tank, a dryer that we can push to 700bph dumping very hot and an air system that can just handle that max output. Everything works good and is paid for. So it’s great. 20 miles away we have another bin site that we rent that is relatively similar. It’s all older but the dryer and legs are bigger capacity which is nice. Only 180,000 bushels of storage there.
So our desire would be to quit renting and increase our capacity at home. We have a plan that can accommodate 2 bins to get us back to that 180k bushels we would give up renting, one already in our footprint and one in some dead space that is just grass right now and is never used. That all works fine. Bigger logistics would be either replacing our current pit with a real big one or adding a second similar sized pit conveyor to catch the second hopper. Our leg would still be big enough but it would be working all the time. Need a bigger wet bin but we have a 36k bushel bin directly beside the leg and dryer that we would change the unload and make it a wet bin so that’s not overly complicated. Would need twice the drying capacity and in the bigger bins it would be nice to dump cool corn so a new dryer would be the ticket. That would require a dryer leg to feed, right now we have an auger mounted from our wet bin to dryer. Then the increased dryer capacity would overload the air system so we either need a huge air system or a dry leg, a large dry leg would require pretty significant conveyors to most of the bins. And we wouldn’t be able to reclaim grain back to the main leg from either of the new bins whereas now we can reclaim all our bins at both sites. We would also have to put a new drive in from the road to get to the unload on one of the new bins, really need a better truck entrance anyway so that could connect cleanly with the rest of the drives and be pretty nice. Could have some room for growth even after that, three 27’ bins sitting in a tight triangle could be replaced with a 60’ in the same footprint and net us another 100k of storage.
So the pencil gets pushed and you see the cost and really choke. Obvious pros of having everything in one spot, we are right on a US highway which is great, the other site is out in the country. And only having one dryer to manage, all the trucks are stored at home so you don’t have to run 20 miles empty to get loaded every day, etc. Cons, the fields that are 5 miles from our rented site would be 25 from home which would require another truck and driver to keep the combine moving, the cost of the project and related electrical improvements, only real “growth” capacity of 100k bushels available at home over our current total without significant expenses with replacing some buildings to free up space for bins, the house is there at home and the wife doesn’t love the bees wings as it is and twice the bushels and a mixed flow dryer would make that significantly more of a mess.
Long term something will get done, but it probably involves a different house due to the last con I listed which adds to the overall scope.
So then I consider all that and think dang a new site more in the middle of our farming footprint would be awesome but hard to justify new if it doesn’t catch all the bushels and it’s hard to justify that when we already have a lot of storage at home. Anyway, it’s interesting to think about. Grain facilities are a headache but as someone else said, the satisfaction of looking at a good looking setup every day is incredible.
It’s not something to joke about but a few years ago a tornado flattened everything at a neighbors place, they have a great grain facility now and got to put a house up elsewhere. I’d hate to know what the costs were but some days I think that would be the simplest catalyst to changes like these
Edited by JRCS Farms 1/30/2026 20:41
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New bin setup ROI
