Temporary storage post-storm and otherwise: grain bagging

Shay

Foulk: And it all comes down to this. Two on, two out, bottom of the ninth. The Farmers lead by one. Full count, here comes the play at the plate, and it's the Ag View Pitch! Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today you have Shay Polk joined with Zane. Zane, how's it going today?

Zane

Erickson: Not too bad, Oriel.

Shay

Foulk: Well, can't complain. I think there's a lot of farmers out there that are dealing with bigger issues than what I'm seeing in this area. I'm in eastern Illinois headed over to Indiana today. Crops look fairly good. I think we could use a little bit of rain, but there's a lot of folks in the Midwest right now that have been dealing with storms and everything else that's gone through. And one of the primary reasons we reached out to you today is to talk a little bit about temporary storage. So I was wondering if you can maybe give the listeners a little background of where you're at and what you do, and, you know, that'll give us a little background on why we're talking with you today.

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, so my name is Zane Erickson with Northstar Ag out of Tower City, North Dakota, which would be about 40 miles west of Fargo. We're a short-line machinery dealer, and one of the things we specialize in is temporary grain storage, whether it's bagging breeding hopper bands or grain rings. Basically, in the Dakotas here, the further west you go, the more variability we see. There's years that they can have a lot of excess grain that they have to deal with at harvest time, so that's where the bagging comes in, or the grain rings as well, but mainly on the bag side of things. We have a lot of experience in all those fields, but baking especially, that's kind of one of the things we've chose to specialize in. And we've done a lot with them. We also, as you know, farm as well. And we utilize the baking system on our farm quite a bit.

Shay

Foulk: Great. Well, that'll be good to talk with someone here that actually has hands-on experience. And it's a little bit of an interesting dynamic right now because of the grain and crop that was severely damaged out there, particularly in areas of South Dakota, Central Iowa, and then some into Illinois as well. A lot of producers are saying, well, you know, we don't have the grain out there. But at the same time, so many of these facilities were wrecked or destroyed or completely unserviceable for the foreseeable future because of the damage. So let's talk a little bit about baggers. You know, I guess, why did you guys decide to specialize in that, as you said, and are they a good means of storage? And maybe what are some of the caveats to that?

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, so the main reason why we chose to specialize in it is we were finding that it wasn't being serviced in the state of North Dakota. We decided that that was one thing we could kind of get in on the ground level and provide a good service to our customers. We've started— I think we started in 2014 with the baggers. We basically bagged every year on our farm since then. As well, every bagger we sell within at least a 100-mile radius, we deliver and set up. So meaning that I've been on a lot of other people's farms and made a lot of grain bags in the past or whatever. So typically we do somewhere— I was adding it up. I was talking to my marketing guy out of Iowa, and he was asking, well, how many bushels have you put in a bag?

And it's, well, collectively with customers and stuff, I was figuring out how many bags I had sold, and it's got to be up over 15 million bushels that we put in bags or whatever ourselves. So we have a lot of experience. We do it on our farm as well as we've been on a lot of other people's farms helping them as well. So we kind of understand the different crops, what moistures you can, can put in, and what to expect out of a bagging system.

Shay

Foulk: So what kind of capacity should farmers be looking at or considering when they think of the bagging system? What's it— what What's a good fit for that?

Zane

Erickson: So on the farm side of things, so basically you have your commercial baggers and you have your farm baggers. On the farm side, you have 10-foot baggers as the most common size. A 10x3, 100-foot bagger is the most common size. They do make a 500-foot bagger, which you can put all different size 10-foot bags on. But the 300-footer is the most common. So a 10x3 on corn will hold about 13,000 bushels, 12 to 13. A 10x5 will be about 22,000.

Shay

Foulk: Okay, right. With the—

Zane

Erickson: with the weight and density and stuff goes in with that, but that affects the capacity just like any other bin, but that's a pretty common number.

Shay

Foulk: Right, so pretty significant amount of bushels there that you're talking for operations of different sizes that have been impacted not only by the weather, but are also maybe just looking at baggers as a form of temporary storage. Is there a certain bushel need from farm operations that make bagging a good fit? So say if they have 80,000 bushels of capacity that they can't service currently, or 100,000, you know, what do you see in operations where that number becomes a good fit, or, or does it matter that much?

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, so what I always tell guys, um, to get the— your cost per bushel about as low as you're going to get, you'll probably want to do 100,000 bushels, um, 100,000 bushels over a 5-year period to get your cost of baking. So like when I'm figuring out my, um, what it costs to bake on the farm side I'm figuring amortization of about 100,000 to 150,000 bushels per year for a 3 to 5 year period. And then it comes out to be 12 to 15 cents per bushel is what it cost us to bag at that point. So obviously the more bushels you run through it, the lower your cost— the lower your cost per bushel gets when bagging. So we've had guys do 3 to 5 bags a year, and we've had guys do 40 bags a year. So it really varies, but I, I would say that 5 bags plus, which would be close to $80,000, makes sense to buy one at that point.

Shay

Foulk: Okay, great. And then let's talk a little bit on the moisture side. You referenced that, and I think that can certainly be an area of concern, especially for someone that's maybe not familiar with it. So, you know, when you're looking at corn, potentially even soybeans, what are, what are your moisture limits? What are some general good practices for moisture in bags?

Zane

Erickson: So on the corn side of things, I would consider 17-18% dry in a bag. Because the thing to remember in a bag, it's an anaerobic environment, not an aerobic environment, so it doesn't have any air for anything to spoil, as long as you maintain the integrity of the bag.

Shay

Foulk: Right.

Zane

Erickson: So, we can put water grain and not have to worry about it spoiling like you do in a bin. I've personally put in up to 30% into a bag and kind of more short-term storage, you know, maybe It's probably typically pretty cold when we're putting it in there in November, so it's going to be right around that freezing mark, that 30 to 40 degrees. Then, I'm probably taking it out before it warms up for the summertime. We've probably ran that November to March timeframe, and then it works okay. 30 moisture corn is a pain to handle, whether it's you know, in your bin, in your dryer, in a bag. But it is possible. This last year we used our bagging system as kind of our wet bin because we had dryer capacity issues with it being cold and so wet. So we would combine for a day, bag for a day, combine for a day, bag for a day.

So we were bagging anywhere from 25 to 30 moisture corn, and it stored just fine. It doesn't come out of a big super swell at 30 moisture. You know, just like any— 30 moisture just doesn't auger very well. So you can put very high moisture corn in, and I would pretense that with understand what you're getting into when you're doing that and just making sure you're monitoring it more correctly. Ideally, the drier the better. But we can put higher moisture grain in without it spoiling.

Shay

Foulk: Well, I think that's a really important point of the conversation because so much of this corn that's down— there's a lot of advocates out there for, you know, we need to get out there and get this corn picked up off the ground, for one, if it's down, but also just to maintain that stalk and ear shank integrity. We need to make sure that we're getting out there and doing everything that we can. A lot of guys talking about getting out at 28-30% to get the corn out of the field, just because we know looking ahead there's some areas that are going to have a long harvest. So I appreciate the insight on that. And then for soybeans, I'm guessing similar, maybe 13-15% with that anaerobic environment. Is that kind of in the ballpark there?

Zane

Erickson: Yep. No, I'd say you're right on. Yep. I always tell guys, if guys are contemplating doing beans or corn, what I tell them is put your beans in the bin, bag your corn. And the reason being, one is the cost per bushel. You know, your beans are $8 to $10, your corn is $3 to $4 kind of deal. So if there's anything that does go bad in a bag, you know, it's just less. You know, whether you get road incident or whatever, it's something to consider. To a corn bag. Corn just stays in a bag better than soybeans, but a corn, the moisture doesn't migrate through the bag like it does in soybeans. If you get a hole in the bottom of the bag from a mouse or something like that, it kind of is just there and doesn't spread through the bag, where soybeans, it seems to migrate through the bag and has more issues. So they can work very well with soybeans.

Just keep an eye on the bag, and bag integrity is more important than it is on corn. Where corn, you can— corn's pretty easy to store in a bag. It doesn't take a whole lot. Soybeans, you just have to watch more. So as far as like ground—

Shay

Foulk: go ahead. I was just going to say, as far as like ground preparation, are farmers, as far as leveling areas of the field, gravel areas, cement areas, where are these bags going? And what's kind of the best as far as that bag integrity that you were mentioning there?

Zane

Erickson: The smoother the better. We typically bag out in cornfields, so we're bagging on top of corn stalks. What we like to see is to get a Box Blade or a Bobcat out there to at least knock down the stalks. Some of them will pop back up, but do it all in one direction, the direction you're going to be bagging. As far as the, the site, what you like to see, you like to see gradual grade if possible. Sometimes it's not, but you like to make uphill and just make sure there's no good— not going to be any water ponding.

Shay

Foulk: Okay.

Zane

Erickson: So, you know, you can dig downhill, it's just a little bit more difficult. They recommend digging uphill, and then if you can put them on a at a north-south direction if they're going to be there longer than a couple months.

Shay

Foulk: Is that just for snowfall concerns, or what's your reasoning behind that?

Zane

Erickson: Just for snowfall. Your prevailing winds are typically northwest to southeast, as well as it's the sun, at least in North Dakota here,— it's always on the south side. So if you have an east-west one, your bag gets sunbaked on the south side, where if it's north-south, the whole bag gets the sun. So it's not just concentration on the one side.

Shay

Foulk: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. So you touched briefly on rodents. How much of an issue is something like that, and what control measures can you have there?

Zane

Erickson: So we've done it in a couple different spots, like whether it's on the field, uh, directly digging in the field, or we've also done it in our farmyard. We have way harder times with rodents in the farmyard than we do in the field. When we're out in the field, um, we see very little issues with any rodents or wildlife. Um, but every area is different. Some, some have heavy deer pressure and you gotta make sure they stay off. Um, pheasant problems can be an issue. Um, So you just got to kind of watch it.

Shay

Foulk: Deer—

Zane

Erickson: to keep deer off, you can just put electric fence around like a cattle farmer would. Or there's a spray that kind of keeps animals away. I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head. But it kind of smells like a human. So then it kind of keeps the animals out. So there's a multitude of ways to kind of keep it out. The biggest thing is just keep an eye on your bakes. Most of the time, guys don't see any problems with them. You just want to keep an eye on it.

Shay

Foulk: Right. I think maybe one of the last questions that those listening might have is, what's it look like getting it out of the bag? It seems like it'd be kind of a pain in the rear. How does that look? Because I know there's a lot of different ways to do it.

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, it's actually not bad at all. The whole bagging system, the hardest part of the, you know, filling the bag and taking the bag out is your start. So when you're filling the bag, lowering the bag is the hardest part. Once you get the hang of it, it typically takes 2 guys 10 to 15 minutes. It's not too terrible bad and you kind of get a system down, just like anything. When it comes to taking out of the bag and getting that first bag started, That's the, you know, takes 15 to 20 minutes to kind of get it up on the unloader. But once you start unloading, it's no different than having a kind of a green cart fill in the truck kind of deal. Load the truck in about 10 minutes. As long as you don't have any odd issues, you can do a bag in about 2.5 hours if you have a truck underneath it all the time. So it goes fairly well.

Shay

Foulk: Good deal. Anything else that I maybe haven't asked you there on the bagging system or information that goes along with that that might be helpful to the listeners out there?

Zane

Erickson: I don't think a whole lot. I guess looking at the damage that I've seen, it seems like there's going to be a lot of logistic issues. And the bagging can help with that, whether it's help at harvest time, whether you're short on labor. You can not have as many trucks and you can bag. You can use it as a wet bin. There's multiple different ways. I always tell guys it's a tool in the toolbox. We don't have to cornhole it into one that's only grain storage. There's multiple different ways of looking at it. And guys out in like western North Dakota probably use it the best because they're typically long hauls to the grain elevator. They have a labor shortage. And then they just have a lot of variability in the cropping systems as well as the bushels per acre. So they probably every year use it in a little different way, shape, or form.

But they make it— It's a really effective system for them.

Shay

Foulk: Final question. With cleanup and after use of these bags, what does that look like? What are you doing with the bags? Where do they go?

Zane

Erickson: So the bigs, we typically just burn them. I haven't— locally haven't found a spot to recycle them. They basically, when you take them off, if you have the baler portion, it makes little round bales of bigs. I guess locally, we just don't have a place to recycle them, so you end up burning them.

Shay

Foulk: Gotcha. No, that makes total sense there. So, any last comments here on that system or anything else we should be considering?

Zane

Erickson: I don't think so. I think we kind of went over things. On the commercial side of things, they do have a 12-foot bagger, and then you get about another third of capacity out of your bags with a 12-foot bagger. With the same link.

Shay

Foulk: Okay, all that makes sense. Well, I appreciate your insight on that. If they have any further questions, for those listening, where can they find you at? Where can they find some of these systems and go for more information here?

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, so we have many on hand. They can contact us by phone at 701-361-4790, or they can visit our website at northstar-ag.com.

Shay

Foulk: Great. Well, Zane Erickson with NorthStar Ag, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us on this system. Hopefully it helps someone out there. I know there's a lot of hard decisions being made right now, and if this provides value, you know, be sure to reach out to us, let us know, and get in contact with Zane and the team up there. Appreciate your time today, Zane. Thank you very much.

Zane

Erickson: Yeah, thank you.

Shay

Foulk: And thank you everyone for listening. We will catch you next time on the Ag View Pitch.