|
Northern Indiana | How do you justify a grain leg being added to an existing grain setup?
Currently have a decent grain setup. 7k wet bin, continuous dryer, and 5” air system blowing into 120k of dry storage. The site sees 130-140k most years, might be 170k bushels by the end of this decade. Unload wet corn with a Batco drive over belt dumping into an auger.
I have 40 years left farming I hope, but dad and the help is aging. I hate that they have to climb in and out of the tractor twice every trip, crank the sides up on the belt, and manage grain flow. It is fairly easy to plug up the belt in wet corn when trying to feed the auger hard. Also had one guy accidentally step on it and fall this past year. Unloading bins sucks too - dig holes in the dirt to jam an auger in since old foundations are low, fun in the winter.
I’ve priced a 100’ 5700bph leg in a tower, drive over pit, reclaim from all existing dry bins, plus an 18’ overhead bin and structure. This will easily be a $300k project. Tough to swallow for something that on paper won’t actually make any money. The pit will only save us a little time on each load in the fall, and the overhead won't save enough time to get an extra truckload in per day or anything. The system will be for cleaning things up plus convenience/safety/expansion prep.
I do want to make things easier and safe for everyone and I know I should be able to use this the rest of my career. The leg will also gain us the space to put another 48' bin where the wet auger currently sits, raise 2 bins next to the leg and use the tower as supports for our air piping, double our wet storage capacity, and store dry corn in the wet bin at the end of the season by utilizing the overhead. Due to the layout it's not feasible to do these things if we keep using augers.
I’ve considered doing a grain pump or something similar with a pit plus pouring a lot of concrete around existing bins to make loadout easier. It will leave several problems unsolved, make them harder to fix in the future, and I’ll probably spend half the leg money doing it. I also realize if I pull the trigger I might regret not having the cash available if ground comes up for sale. Fairly rare around here and pockets probably aren't deep enough anyway.
Just wonder if there’s any advice out there to justify the cost when the system doesn’t actually have any ROI on paper.
| |
|
Justify a Grain Leg
