HONEYFORD, N.D. - Corn isn't king around here yet, but the crop is making enough inroads in the Red River Valley to force elevators to invest in more storage, both permanent and temporary.
Kevin Peach, manager of the Farmers Elevator of Honeyford, about 20 miles northwest of Grand Forks, said Monday that corn used to be only 25 percent of his business. Now, he says, thanks in part to a surge in biofuel production locally, it's about 75 percent.
Larger trains hauling products away from his elevator and an overall bumper harvest this year already has forced Peach to add about 210,000 bushels of storage space to his operation, he said.
The expansion of corn and other biofuel crops - commodities that take up more storage space - only is exacerbating that need in the Valley, experts say.
"It was something that we'd been planning for years, but with the corn coming in now like it is, it made it even more conducive for doing it," Peach said.
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Willie Huot, Grand Forks County extension agent, said, in recent years, there has been a movement in the county to grow more biofuel crops, such as corn.
"It's a huge reason for what we are seeing," he said. "If you replace an acre of wheat with an acre of corn, you're going to need to have two to three times the amount of storage space to handle it."
Quick, cheap relief
Peach, like a number of elevators managers across the region, has implemented temporary storage bunkers for quick and fairly cheap relief. The bunkers, solid foundations with short reinforced walls that form a bowl shape, hold mountains of crops. They're sometimes covered by huge tarps and aeration systems.
Peach said he has about 350,000 bushels of corn on the ground in Honeyford alone. The company has other elevators in nearby Gilby, McCanna and Niagara.
"If you are going to have all this grain coming at you," Peach said, "you're going to have to have a place to put it."
Energy effect
Peach has a simple explanation for the surge in corn production locally.
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"Ethanol," he said. "It's all about energy."
Gary Theisen, manager of the Emerado Farmers Elevator, said his operation deals mostly in sunflowers, another popular biofuel source. He plans to add two more storage bins next year.
"It's not something that I want to do, but it's something that we're going to have to do," Theisen said.
Mike Morgan, manager of the Thompson Farmers Co-op elevator, said his elevator will add about 500,000 bushels of new storage space, a new dryer and a 120-foot dump pit.
"We're building as we speak," Morgan said.
Bin-busting
As of Nov. 1, about 330 million bushels of crop storage space, to include temporary bunkers, were licensed by the state and federal government in North Dakota, according to the state Public Service Commission. That total represents a 16 percent increase over the previous record set two years ago.
Nearly 40 million bushels of harvested crops in North Dakota currently are sitting outside traditional elevator warehouses and bins, about 35 percent more than in 2005, said Tony Clark, PSC commissioner in charge of monitoring the state's elevators.
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More than 2.5 million bushels in construction of new bunkers or other temporary storage structures has taken place this year alone, the PSC estimates.
"This is truly a bin-busting harvest," Clark said.
