Summer Project

This summer the big project at our house is building a new grain bin. The kids had a blast helping the other night prepare the location for a concrete pad that will act as a base for the bin. As you can see, Doug is hard at work in the picture rocking his awesome farmer tan! He has spent countless nights and weekends along with help from his parents working on it, and I know he will spend much more time on it this summer. The kids had a moment to stop for a picture, but obviously he didn’t! The kids had a good bath that night after helping as they were quite the dirty kiddos.

Why do we need to build this grain bin? We will harvest corn this fall from the field we own down the road, and we need a place to put it. All farmers don’t sell their harvested grain in the fall immediately after it has been picked. Corn is sold all throughout the year, and the price fluctuates according to need. In the fall, there is often a large supply of corn meaning the grain price is often lower. Farmers do their best to sell when the price is the highest, but they never know what the grain price might do the next day. At harvest, farmers have choices as to where to put their grain. They can take it to a grain elevator, which is a facility owned by someone else used to store and sell grain. At the elevator, farmers can either sell it for whatever the current grain price may be, or have it stored at the elevator until they choose to sell their grain.

However, storage at the grain elevator does come at a price. Hence, the reason we are building a new grain bin. Think of it like a storage unit. You have extra stuff, and you need to store it somewhere. You don’t have room at your house, so you rent a storage unit owned by someone else. You pay a monthly set fee to store your stuff until you move it out. The same goes for a farmer’s grain. The longer they store it, the more they pay the grain elevator for storage. This cost is deducted when they sell their grain.

By building our own storage unit for our grain, we pay a big cost up front. However, in a few short years the cost of the bin will pay for itself since we don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on grain storage at the elevator. It took A LOT of convincing to me from my husband to spend this large sum on a new grain bin. Personally, I like the idea of a new car, a vacation home, or a swimming pool, but the grain bin won over…

Originally posted on The Real Housewives of Rural Illinois blog.