Near-north Ontario, French River | I have to agree with Oliver on this one, IMHO you dont need a 800buh system for the number of acres you are looking at. I dont know what kind of yields you are getting but just for sh$ts and giggles lets say you average 200bu/a. over your proposed 550 acres. That potentially gives you 110,000 bu of corn each fall. Im going to assume you forward contract or at the very least sell some of your crop each fall in some manner. If it were me i would consider going to an inbin system, such as the shivers or neco, and go with maybe two 20,000bu bins, one of which would contain the shivers/neco type system. This would give you a total of 40,000bu of ADDITIONAL storage. You say you are air drying now so unless your current bins are very small and in need of major repair I dont see a need to spend beaucoup bucks building a large grain set up for 550 acres of corn. If you are harvesting 16000bu/day , assuming a 12 day , you are harvesting 1333bu/hr on average. In a perfect world where money is no object it would be nice to be able to dry 670bu/bu., but why? Cut your harvest rate, perhaps only work 8 hr LOL, and your drying capacity only needs to be 445bu/hr to keep up. I think the savings would be substantial, and you could us the money in the future to expand your bins etc. We are like Oliver,in a normal year we put 350-500acres of corn through our drier, albiet its usually 25-28% moisture. We take our time and only run 6 hrs a day on average and still get done in good time. Lot less stress then running 12 hr days, when theres no real need unless you have other work commitments etc. |
Grain Dryers
