SIOUX CENTER, Iowa (Iowa Media Wire) — More than a dozen farmers gathered at the Farmers Cooperative Society in Sioux Center to check out the improvements being made to a grain elevator.
“I mean, this is kind of exciting here,” Jacob Korzeniewski with the co-op said. “This is really the first big upgrade here in Sioux Center that we’ve had for the grain side.”
According to the co-op’s annual report, their facilities handled almost 150,000 acres of corn and more than 190,000 acres of soybeans in 2021. Earlier this year, the co-op began making improvements to help increase the amount of grain they could handle.
“Put in a new receiving pit, leg, and be able to hit most of our grain elevator at full speed at 20,000 bushels an hour receiving capacity, so that means we can intake grain at 20,000 bushels per hour,” Korzeniewski said. “So this adds another secondary dump here. So this will be our main dump pit for harvest. Then using the house three pit for kind of our speed and more efficiency when we do have some lines.”
During last year’s harvest, farmers were sometimes waiting two or more hours to unload at the grain bin. With the project almost completed, the Farmers Cooperative Society invited producers on a tour of the facility.
“There are new improvements that I’ve seen today are going to be very, very helpful for the fact of unloading time, not waiting so long in line to get back to the field, to the combine,” Sioux Center farmer Ken Klein said. “They have a couple of different dump sites that we have a choice of now. We can unload soybeans and corn at the same time when both are being harvested. It’s going to be a great thing.”
During the tour, Klein brought new suggestions for more improvements in the future.
“Might be nice to have some lights letting us know when we have been tested and when we’re done at the scale or even at the pit when we’re done unloading, because sometimes it’s very hard to see and we want to make sure nobody gets hurt,” Klein said. “We’re driving in and out.”
The grain elevator improvements are expected to be completed by harvest.