GRAIN GUY FIFTY BLOG

Whether you are putting in a dryer on a new site or finally replacing a unit that has been held together with baling wire and optimism, the questions are mostly the same. Replacement projects just carry more surprises, and they have a way of showing up after the old dryer is already cut out and the crane has gone home. Work through this checklist before you decide anything. Start With What the Dryer Actually Has to Do Before you look at a single spec sheet, you need to start

An alligator is nipping at the supervisor’s backside, At that same moment, someone is throwing monkeys onto the supervisor’s back.

If you can see it, you can fix it.

Most elevators already have more data than they know what to do with. Scale tickets, pit logs, downtime notes, system reports, you name it. The problem is not getting the numbers. The problem is using them in a way that actually helps farmers, keeps end users happy, and protects your own margin. In the Five Habits post in GG50, I talked about reliability, repeatability, waste free operations, error proofing, and sustainability. Those are what separate a steady, profitable ele

Remember Dale, our farmer from the Repeatability post. We talked about him not complaining, and that was the problem we identified. He had been hauling to the same elevator for fifteen years. Good people. Solid operation. Nothing he could point to as a major issue. But sometime around the middle of October, something started to feel off. Not every load. Not enough to argue about. Just enough to notice. A 15.2 moisture hat felt like it should have been a 14.8. A dock that sho

“IS WHAT WE’RE DOING NOW STILL SOMETHING WE CAN SUSTAIN?”

The dryer had been running the same way for eleven years. Plenum temp set where the old operator left it. Moisture out averaging 13.2 on corn going to a customer whose contract called for 14.0. Nobody complained. The grain was going out dry, the customer was happy, and the crew knew the routine. It was a "good running" dryer. Everybody said so. What nobody had done in eleven years was the math. At the throughput that elevator was running, over-drying to 13.2 on a 14.0 contra

By Grain Guy Fifty After more than fifty years in this business — walking thousands of grain operations in over twenty countries, from little country elevators to export terminals, I’ve learned that the fundamentals never change. I’ve seen every type of system, every crop year, every management style, and every “new solution” that promised to fix everything. Some help, some don’t, and some are just marketing. But the operations that succeed year after year all share the same

Fifty years ago, I received my BS in Agricultural Business Management from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA. The curriculum included...