Today's post was shared by US Dept. of Labor and comes from www.omaha.com
The big tanker full of corn rumbled into the Frontier Cooperative grain elevator in Mead, Neb., deposited a few hundred bushels into the underground receiving pit and was gone in less than five minutes.
The driver spoke with no one — the receiving, weighing and documentation are all automated via digital scanners at the handling facility about 30 miles west of Omaha, one of 13 in the farmer-owned cooperative's family of grain elevators.
And for farmers, time is money, especially at harvest time, when the trucks will be lined up onto County Road 10 to get the grain on the train. The corn is California-bound, where it goes to feed dairy cows. As for the soybeans, they ride the rails to pressing plants to be turned into soy oil, which Randy Robeson said is in about everything these days.
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“We are getting more done in an hour here than we ever used to,” said Robeson, Frontier Cooperative's general manager. “We can receive 1,000 bushels in 30 seconds and can load a 100-car train in 10 hours.”
It is all part of the nation's grain elevator system, one part of the world's most productive agricultural economy. Grain elevators are the concrete and steel sculptures found on rural roads all over Nebraska, the bins, tanks and silos where corn and soybeans are received, sorted, sometimes dried and eventually stored until...
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