PEORIA MAGAZINE November 2023

SEED AND SOIL

GRAIN BINS ARE A CRITICAL LINK BETWEEN FARM AND CONSUMER

BY THOMAS BRUCH PHOTO BY RON JOHNSON

A s the air turns crisp and the temperatures cool, Peoria area residents begin to fre quent the typical customs and attractions that herald the fall season: apple orchards, pumpkin patches, Spoon River Drive, haunted houses. While traveling to these often rural fall destinations, someone is likely to encounter a grain elevator, the towering storage facilities that loom over the flat Midwestern terrain. For Clay Liesman and anyone else involved in the operations of these grain elevators that dot the central Illinois landscape, the arrival of autumn brings the busy season of the local agricultural harvest and its attendant traits: metric tons of corn and soybeans, unantici pated challenges and long, labor-filled hours. “You have breakdowns … all the little things that happen,” said Liesman, the grain division manager for Ag-Land FS, Inc. “And you meet an array of peo ple in your job, from the electricians to the sanitation crews that come in and clean things out. There are a lot of working pieces that go into running a grain elevator.” At its core, the grain elevator serves as a vertical, multi-story storage unit for corn and beans. Farmers bring their

harvested crop to the local grain eleva tor and are paid out at the market price they’ve locked in as designated by the Chicago Board of Trade. At that point, the grain elevator stores bushel upon bushel of harvested goods before routing it to the marketplace or end user. THE MIDDLE MAN The elevator, in essence, acts as the formal middle man in the life cycle of the central Illinois harvest. “Many farmers either do not want to make the investment in on-farm storage or trucking, so a local country grain elevator is convenient and economical for them to bring their grain at harvest,” said Patrick Kirchhofer, manager of the Peoria County Farm Bureau. But there’s much more transpiring at these grain elevator operations than simple storage, and Liesman’s role is to oversee it all. Ag-Land FS — a locally owned agricultural co-operative serving producers in Peoria, Tazewell, Logan and Fulton counties — boasts seven grain elevator sites: in Green Valley, Canton, Bartonville, Elmwood, Williamsfield, Dunlap and Monica. Ag-Land recently acquired the Monica Co-Op, which doubled its cumulative storage capacity to 14 million bushels.

The vast majority of that storage is devoted to corn and soybeans, although Liesman noted that Ag-Land also deals in some wheat and corn sorghums. ‘THEY CAN CONTRACT AHEAD IF THEY THINK THE MARKET IS GOING TO GO UP IN THE FUTURE, AND THEY CAN STORE THOSE BUSHELS WITH US’ — Clay Liesman The sheer physical labor required to move that capacity into storage is daunting. But grain managers like Liesman also supervise the numerous individual transactions for each of those corn and soybean bushels with farmers in addition to the handling and processing involved once those crops are in his company’s care. On the financial side, elevators such as Ag-Land offer several different op tions for farmers selling their harvest. A farmer could simply go with the market price on that particular day — in the first week of October, the height of the harvest season, prices for corn were $4.59 per bushel, $12.26 per bushel for soybeans.

10 NOVEMBER 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE

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