New construction at the Ludlow Co-op Elevator Co. elevator in Buckley, IL includes a 105-foot- and a 90-foot-diameter Sukup steel tank at far left and new receiving pit and GSI leg immediately to the right of the new tanks.
The story of Ludlow Co-op Elevator Co.’s storage expansion and upgrade at its Buckley, IL (217-394-2331) branch elevator starts five miles to the north at another Ludlow facility in the tiny community of Del Rey, IL.
“It’s an old elevator, and we’ve been phasing it out,” says General Manager Paul Seaman, who has been with Ludlow since 2014. (He came from the former East Lincoln cooperative, now part of Topflight Grain Co.)
“Right now, we’re only using Del Rey for soybeans,” he continues. “We needed to expand our storage, but any expansion would have to be somewhere else.”
The “somewhere else” turned out to be Buckley, with direct access to U.S. Highway 45 and a mile from Interstate 57.
The project, completed to the point where it could be used for the 2020 harvest, involved the addition of two new Sukup corrugated steel tanks, rated at 844,000 and 613,000 bushels capacity, respectively.
In addition, the cooperative replaced three small, aging grain dryers with a 6,000-bph Sukup tower dryer, added a third receiving pit with a 20,000-bph GSI leg, and installed a new outbound truck scale.
Ludlow Co-op Elevator Co. is one of the oldest continually operating grain cooperatives in Illinois, founded on Jan. 7, 1904 by a group of 83 farmers around the town of Ludlow (15 miles south of Buckley). They pledged a total of $6,000 to build the coop’s original wood elevator along the former Illinois Central (now Canadian National [CN]) tracks.
Today, Ludlow Coop operates a total of eight grain facilities with a total storage capacity of 20 million bushels handling corn, soybeans, and soft red winter wheat. In addition to Buckley, the cooperative has elevators at Ludlow, Paxton, Perdueville, Del Rey, Piper City, La Hogue, and Danforth.
Of these, the cooperative’s largest facility far and away is at the north end of Paxton along the CN, the large rail terminal with more than 7 million bushels of licensed storage and a ladder-type railyard with enough track to hold more than a shuttle train worth of covered hopper cars.
Ludlow Co-op also has smaller rail-loading capabilities at two other sites – 15 cars at La Hogue and seven cars at Piper City.
From the terminal at Paxton, the coop ships commodities by rail to the Gulf for export or to the southeastern poultry and swine feed markets. By truck, corn goes to a nearby ethanol plant, while soybeans mostly go a local soy processing plant.
Grain from the La Hogue and Piper City elevators is shipped on the Toledo, Peoria & Western short-line to the Pekin/Peoria processing markets.
For the $6.9 million 2020 project at Buckley, Ludlow Co-op took bids and awarded the contract to Grain Flo Inc., Heyworth, IL (309-473-2512), which served as general contractor and millwright.
Seaman says that Grain Flo has a long track record of projects with Ludlow, most recently adding storage at Piper City.
Excavation on the project began early in March. Craig’s Concrete installed and removed shoring for excavation of the new receiving pit.
The 844,000-bushel Sukup tank stands 105 feet in diameter, 106 feet 5 inches at the eave, and 132 feet 4 inches at the peak. The dimensions on the smaller 613,000-bushel tank are 90 feet in diameter, 106 feet 5 inches at the eave, and 130 feet 6 inches at the peak.
Both tanks have flat floors, outside stiffeners, and two sidedraw spouts. They both also have Rolfes@Boone grain temperature monitoring systems, 24 cables in the larger tank and 16 cables in the smaller, EXTRON AgTECT grain spreaders for filling the tanks evenly, and 12-inch GSI X-Series zero-entry bin sweeps.
“We prefer the auger-type sweeps for handling beans,” Seaman comments.
Aeration is supplied at 1/8 cfm per bushel by four 75-hp Chicago Blower centrifugal fans on the larger tank and four 50-hp Chicago Blower fans on the smaller tank.
Grain is fed to these tanks and other parts of the facility through a new 1,200-bushel enclosed mechanical receiving pit. The pit feeds a 20,000-bph GSI leg enclosed in a 18-foot-x-18-foot-x-170-foot LeMar support tower. The leg is equipped with Maxi-Lift 20x8 TigerTuff buckets mounted on a 22-inch Continental belt.
The leg empties into a Schlagel eight-duct SwingSet distributor, which in turn can reach the new tanks via 20,000-bph overhead GSI belt conveyors, a 5,000-bushel Schuld Bushnell steel screenings tank sitting atop the receiving pit enclosure, and other parts of the facility.
The new storage tanks empty onto GSI 10,000-bph reclaim drag conveyors in above-ground tunnels running back to the receiving leg.
Adjacent to the leg tower is a new Sukup natural gas-fired tower dryer rated at 6,000 bph at five points of moisture removal. The dryer empties into a 8,000-bph GSI dry leg enclosed in the support tower.
To supply enough gas to the dryer, Nicor, the local gas utility, ran a new 4-inch gas line to the dryer site from a main line running along Highway 45. Seaman notes that two of the three older dryers that were replaced ran on propane, so the change will save money on fuel.
Finally, the coop hired Walz Scales to install a 12-foot-x-70-foot Rice Lake pit scale to serve as an outbound scale. A Greenstone oneWeigh scale ticket printer stands adjacent to the new scale, so drivers don’t need to leave their cabs.
Ed Zdrojewski, editor
Reprinted in November/December 2020 Grain Journal