Great Bend Co-op Association’s branch elevator at Susank, KS with a new 726,000-bushel jumpforn concrete annex on the left and new office building and scales top left. Aerial photo by Steve Brown Photography, Wichita, KS.
You used to see them all over Kansas – the old Chalmers Borton slipform concrete elevators, built in the 1950s and 1960s, usually painted a brilliant white.
Great Bend Co-op Association operates one of those at Susank, KS (620-653-7683). Built in 1959, it still performs well after all these decades. The only problem with it is that it holds only about 250,000 bushels of grain. (The site also had a 300,000-bushel temporary storage pile.)
That’s not very practical with modern yields and volumes, so the cooperative decided to add storage. In early July 2021, Great Bend began receiving new crop wheat at a new 726,000-bushel jumpform concrete annex just to the north of the old workhouse.
The old section will remain in use, says Location Manager Jeff Cotton, who joined Great Bend 16 years ago after working outside of the grain industry in Minnesota.
“We plan to put corn, soybeans, and milo in the old house,” Cotten says, “and we’ll use the new bins mainly for wheat and some milo.”
In addition to the concrete annex, Great Bend in 2020-21 also built a new office building flanked by inbound and outbound truck scales, directly across Hoisington Street from the elevator. The new scales are expected to speed up truck traffic during harvest periods, reducing the amount of time trucks block traffic on village streets.
Chief Operating Officer Jeff Mauler, who has spent his entire 32-year grain industry career with Great Bend, says at the moment, concrete and steel storage are comparable in price to build. One driving factor for Great Bend was better insurance rates for concrete.
“We took bids and awarded the job to Frisbie Construction (Gypsum, KS/785-536-4288),” Mauler says. “We liked the design and their flexibility on the timeline. They did well for us.”
Building the concrete tanks was McPherson Concrete Storage Systems, McPherson, KS (800-999-8151).
Construction on the $4-million-plus project started in September 2020, and work was just finishing up when Grain Journal visited in mid-July 2021. The new concrete annex tanks already were receiving grain from the 2021 wheat harvest.
The concrete annex includes a pair of 363,000-bushel McPherson Concrete jumpform tanks. These stand 64 feet in diameter and 128 feet tall. During construction, soil conditions required the installation of 50 pilings per tank running 69 feet deep.
Each tank has a sidedraw spout for truck loading but no sweep auger. Instead, each tank has a 7-foot-x-7-foot hinged entrance door to allow a skid steer loader to enter for final cleanout.
The tanks also lacked grain temperature monitoring systems in July, but the cooperative planned to equip each tank with a 11-cable Rolfes@Boone system.
Each tank has a set of four Tiernan 50-hp centrifugal fans supplying aeration at 1/7 cfm per bushel through flush-floor ducting. Each tank also has eight 2-hp powered roof vents plus an additional six non-powered vents.
Instead of turning west from Hoisington Street to the elevator, incoming truckers turn east to a new single-story steel office building. This is flanked on either side by a Mettler-Toledo 80-foot-x-11-foot above-ground pit-type truck scale, one inbound and one outbound. Scales are under the control of Merchant Ag software, and each has a scaleside Gamet JaHam truck probe, which allows trucks to be routed in each direction.
Samples are tested on a DICKEY-john GAC2500 UGMA moisture meter and an MCi Kicker dockage tester. Depending on results, trucks are sent to one of two receiving pits across the street.
The new pit serving the annex holds approximately 1,200 bushels. The gravity pit feeds a Schlagel 20,000-bph receiving leg outfitted with Tapco 20x8 low-profile buckets on 7-inch centers mounted on a 22-inch Continental belt supplied by Applied Power Products.
The leg deposits grain into a Schlagel six-duct electric rotary distributor. Two ducts deposit grain via gravity spout directly into the jumpform tanks; another two deposit it onto Schlagel 20,000-bph drag conveyors currently used to top off the tanks. The conveyors can be extended to any future tanks that could be built. A fifth spout goes to a new workhouse distributor or a drag runing to a truck-loading surge bin.
Ed Zdrojewski, editor
