Viewing a thread - Bin site: Is drying with propane really that bad?

Looking at sites on the highway as our roads at our base of operations are not great. I don't own any ground on the highway but I rent some. I haven't talked to them but I imagine one of the owners might sell me a spot.

7.3 miles from base when roads are good. 10.8 or 13.3 when roads are bad
On the highway
Would probably need $100K+ to get the 3 phase we need now and who knows how much it would cost for future upgrades.
Has natural gas running under it. Line owned by a willing neighbor but natural gas company says it doesn't have enough capacity for another dryer. Would likely need $300K or so to get natural gas running to it
1% chance someone will want to upgrade line in the next 10+ years and we'd be able to work with them to get natural gas to the site more economically
Almost none of our production would have to backtrack on the way towards this site

Site 3

11.8 miles from base when roads are good. 15.2 or 17.7 if the roads are bad
On the highway or close to it
Would be close to 3 phase and natural gas
Would be on the way to getting grain closer to our buyers anytime trucks are hauling there
Hauling from our furthest field would be 35 miles
Average haul would be something like 15 or 17 miles
I don't have a relationship with landowners in this area. Would likely be challenging to get one of them to sell me a slice for a bin site

I lean towards Site 1.

For scale I could imagine this being 600K or so bushels in 10 years. For context if I hauled everything to town the average haul would be 27 or so miles during harvest. All of my storage is grain bags right now. The only thing I don't like about that (and it's a huge disadvantage) is that I have to wait until the corn moisture gets down to 16% or less before harvesting.

In my ideal world I'd start harvesting at 25% but I think I could start at 20% or so with lots of air in my climate so this bin site would be a large improvement. If it was fully developed (allowing me to partially fill bins and then easily move dried bins to one of the bins) I think I could get at least half of my crop harvested before anything hit 16% with just air drying. And if I wanted to add drying in the future, is it really that expensive with propane? The people I know in the area who have natural gas dryers spend maybe $0.015 per bushel on natural gas. Even if propane was 5x I don't think that would stop a dryer from being a good tool to add?

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