If you’re planning out your harvest logistics and stumped on where you’re going to store all the harvested grain, grain bagging just might be the solution you’re looking for.
Shannon McComas, vice president of sales and marketing at Loftness Specialized Equipment, is seeing a huge increase in demand for grain bagging equipment.
He says a record crop in 2023 followed by a record corn yield in 2024 that will likely be surpassed this fall has left rural communities with no room in grain bin storage.
McComas says if you have a tractor with a PTO rated at 50HP to 150HP — and most row crop farmers do — you just need a grain bagger and unloader to extract the grain from the bags back into a grain cart or truck.
The bags commonly come in three different sizes, 250', 300' and 500', with diameters of 9', 10' or 12'. He says most farmers opt for the 10' or 12' bags that best suit their storage needs.
“Some guys, they come into fall harvest, and the bin is already full of last year’s crop. They need to take that out of the bin and put it into a bag because it’s dried down,” McComas explains. “Then, they can put higher-moisture grain from the new crop in their bins where they have fans to move air and dry it down.”
Cost-wise, grain bagging makes a ton of sense (pardon the bad pun).
“You’re talking about pennies per bushel of storage cost versus multiple dollars per bushel for permanent storage,” he says.
As far as the bags themselves, they are built to withstand a Midwest fall and winter pounding from rain, sleet, wind and snow.
“You need to keep an eye on it through the winter, because sometimes you’ll get a puncture from deer or other animals walking on the bags — or the occasional hailstorm. If you cover those small punctures, the grain will come out in as good a condition as it went in,” he says.
The Investment
Craig Fisher farms 15,000 acres of fertile ground 75 miles east of Bismark, N.D. A lot of his ground is rented, and that’s his main motivation for using grain bags.
“We didn’t want to build big grain bins on land we rent, because you never know if you’re going to lose it,” he says. “The bags we use hold about 40 semi loads of grain, and they only cost us about 7¢ per bushel.”
There are, however, significant upfront costs for the bagging equipment. Fischer’s initial investment rang in just under $100,000 for his bagger and the extraction implement.
“You can spend anywhere from $100,000, like we did, up to $300,000 for a top of the line 12' system,” he says. “I have over 25 million bushels of crop run through my bagger. We just have to change the auger flighting, and that’s a cheap fix. It’s such a simple design.”
Top Notch Convenience
Fisher is also a fan of the flexibility grain bags give him in grain marketing. In this area, once you deliver to the local cooperative, you’re locked into their pricing, he says.
“You can’t sell it to CHS after you’ve delivered to ADM. Once they have your grain, you’re stuck,” Fischer adds. “But if you have the grain bagged on your land, you can take it to another elevator, or even to another state if all of the sudden South Dakota is paying big money for protein.”
He also believes the bags help him smooth out annoying bottlenecks in the harvest cycle.
He could be in the middle of harvest and need to get his crop off as soon as possible, but the semi driver isn’t back from dumping yet, his bins are full and the auger isn’t running. That’s not a great feeling for any farmer, especially one calling the shots on a 15,000-acre harvesting operation.
“With a bagger out there in the field, I can have 13 combines running and that one bagger can handle all 13 of those combines,” Fisher adds.
The bags also maintain moisture levels well, Fisher says, and he sees more of his farmer neighbors getting into grain bagging.
“They used to kind of cross their eyes. But now, pretty much everyone is doing it,” he says. “The one thing I tell everyone is, you have to keep it temporary. You don’t want it in there for more than a year, because you can end up paying a big price if wildlife — the deer, coyotes, even pheasants — start getting into it and ripping it open.”
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