Week ending January 26th...

This past week I had the opportunity to travel down to New Orleans and view ADM's AMA grain handling facility courtesy of Nathan Ehrhardt at 1st Farm Credit Services and Lynn Byington at ADM.  It was an excellent trip.  Here are a few facts I discovered while taking this tour:

• Even though this is on the mighty Mississippi River, you are still 117.5 miles up river from where the river exits into the Gulf of Mexico
• 40% of the Port of New Orleans business goes through one of the five NOLA ADM facilities; these combined for over a billion bushels of commodities loaded last year
• 55% of all commodities leave the US through NOLA
• ADM's NOLA locations shipped commodities to 57 different countries last year
• 90% of the grain these facilities receive is via river barges; the remainder is via rail
• ADM currently only owns seven ocean going Pana-max vessels
• This AMA location holds 22 different grains and grain by-products at one time
• AMA can off load an average of 80,000 bushels per hour direct to the waiting ship
• A typical Pana-max vessel holds 2.1m bushels and most carry four to five different commodities per run; these are called "destination loads"
• The only true "one commodity" vessels lately are soybeans headed to China
• It takes roughly 33 days to get from New Orleans to China at an average cost of $30,000 a day for vessel and crew costs
• A Pana-max vessel is 105' wide by 728' long; the new "Post-Pana-max" vessels will be 140' wide making it difficult for current facilities to load

It was amazing to see how this giant operation worked.  They track grain quality and barges throughout the entire US and are always looking 2-3 months forward.  Rarely, do they ship #2 corn and most corn loaded out of NOLA is grade #3.  Each load is tailored to meet rigorous and specific tolerances.  To achieve these exact tolerances, one person blends commodities coming from different silos simultaneously.  It is not a computer doing this, but rather a person trained for three months to perform this specific role.  Also, the amount of paperwork that goes with each shipment is crazy with each barge load on the vessel having to have it's original destination documented.  

If you ever get the chance to go on a tour like this, take the opportunity!

 ADM's AMA facility in New Orleans - one of five of their facilities

Looking across the levy on the Mississippi River side of ADM's AMA facility 

Command central - the gentleman on the left was controlling where the grain was being sent from the barges being unloaded while the gentleman on the right was loading the Pana-max vessel.  He was controlling three different commodities and the blends thereof at the same time... 

Looking up river off the bow of the ship headed for Guatemala

For dust control, this facility uses two giant mist cannons which grab the dust particles in mid air and drag them down in the mist as it settles.

A video of how they unload barges and move the grain in house.  This 77,000 bushel barge that came in from northern Mississippi was unloaded in 55 minutes...

 Another way to unload barges; anchor in the middle of the river and use cranes to grab the commodity and dump it directly into the ship.

Empty barges and a view looking down river.

Mid January...

My apologies for not posting recently.  Blogspot.com is having issues uploading pictures from your computer to the blog site so had to re-work some things with another browser, but now we are back in business.

The winter months bring with them a lot of office work planning for 2013 and wrapping up paperwork from 2012.  They also push us indoors where it's warm.  Lately, we have been busy performing winter maintenance on semi's and various other items.  We are also spending more time crafting our herbicide programs as this spring we will plant corn in 20" rows which will narrow our application window significantly.  In addition to that change, we will be growing some nonGMO or conventional corn with zero genetically modified traits on our Greene County farms and trying to figure out a herbicide program that doesn't involve glyphosate (RoundUp) anymore is a little challenging.  

The weather here has been variable to say the least.  Last Friday it was almost 60 degrees which allowed for enjoyable tear down of the Christmas lights, but the next day brought in a cold front which dumped over an inch of rain on us - thank you!  Two days later we had an ice storm and now we sit in a crystallized winter wonderland.  I guess as long as it's some form of precipitation we will take it.  

When the weather warms we will resume hauling corn from our bins again.

Winter maintenance on one of the semi's 

What we used to haul with 25 years ago...