UP / Thumb of Michigan | scottyb69 - 11/27/2025 11:32
I'm building a pretty big bin here at my house. I'm mainly doing it because I don't have much storage and have to haul corn 40-50 miles round trip during harvest, and I don't have much labor, so harvest drags on way longer than it should. Anyways, I'm looking at when I contract some for fall delivery to going ahead and contracting some for march delivery and holding it until then. I'm shooting for 30 cents a bushel on corn doing this. Is that pretty achievable long term. I don't plan on using the bin as a gambling tool to just put it in and hope it goes up..... I know a lot do and get burnt pretty bad.
My Dad built our first 2 bins- one has a dryer, the other for HOLDING grain, in about 1971. Could only dump a few thousand bushels a day at the local elevator. Their dryer was the hold up. We added HOLDING bins since then, and eventually had enough room to HOLD about 80% of the crop. Depending on weather and crop mix.
None of them were storage bins. When a holding bin becomes a storage bin differs among farms and situations- for us holding anything after March was avoided if at all possible. Theres a number of reasons for that, some pertinent to other areas, some not.
My Dad was a pretty aggressive marketer. I was as well when it was my turn to do the marketing. Selling forward for harvest delivery was something we did on part of the crop. We could dry it and haul it, or if the elevator was hungry for corn, we did negotiate pretty good drying rates sometimes. Better than we could do it ourselves for. After that: our basis, like pretty much everywhere else, got better with time. In the case of corn, for an awful lot of years, the bulk of the basis improvement was in the 3 or 4 months after harvest. The return for storing corn (for us) diminished pretty quickly after that. Your results may differ- but you need to know that typical basis trends are in your area if building a bin is something more than storing for the sake of storing. Interest plays into it. If you're paying interest, thats an incentive to move grain of course. If not, theres till opportunity costs that need to be calculated.
In reality, you can ask farmers from 20 states and you're going to get 40 answers. Might be the same results if you polled anyone in your own county. You really need to get some historical info on basis in your area. Because at the end of the day, basis is the only thing you can have an opportunity to cash in on holding physical grain. Everything else can be done with your file cabinet instead of storing the commodity.
Edited by pat-michigan 11/30/2025 03:57
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Whats everyone shoot for on grain bins making per bushel?
