Keeping up: Ag Valley Coop upgrades two facilities to better serve members

Image courtesy of Chief Agri

Like most grain companies in the United States, the need to keep up with the growth and speed of farmer customers has become the driving force for elevator upgrades.

For Ag Valley Coop, the Arapahoe, NE-based cooperative that traces its roots back to 1953, took that to heart in the fall of 2023, when it decided to speed up grain handling and increase storage capacity at its Edison train-loading and Maywood storage facilities.

For General Manager Jeff Krejdl, who started with the west central Nebraska coop as chief financial officer in 1998 and became general manager in 2019, the process started in the fall of 2023 when the coop hired Blue River Sales & Service, LLC, Kearney, NE, to construct the two projects.

Ag Valley’s decision to partner with Chief Agri and Blue River Sales, Krejdl says, is based on a decade-long relationship. “We have been impressed with their reliability and exceptional service over the years.”

Both projects started in the fall of 2023. The Maywood project was completed in April 2024, and the Edison project finished in September 2024.

Maywood, NE

At the coop’s 6.2-million bushel elevator at Maywood, Krejdl says the truck house that serves local feed lots and ethanol plants had become outdated and too slow to handle today’s larger producers. “Our dumping speed was too slow,” he says. “We needed to get faster.”

To speed up the facility’s receiving capacity, Blue River installed the site’s third receiving pit, a new Chief Agri low-profile receiving system. Due to the site’s high-water table, the two-hopper pit is only 12-foot deep. Both hoppers feed two 18-foot Chief Agri drag conveyors at 12,500-bph each. They then feed a 50-foot Chief Agri 25,000-bph drag conveyor going to a new Chief Agri 25,000-bph bucket elevator outfitted with 16x8 Maxi-Lift Tiger Tuff low profile elevator buckets. The leg sits inside a 14-foot-x-14-foot-x-150-foot Chief Agri support tower with switch-back stairs.

To be more efficient storing grain, the co-op replaced two ground bunkers with a Chief Agri 139-foot-diameter corrugated steel tank. The tank stands 104 feet at the eave and 140 feet at the peak and can store 1.4 million bushels. It has outside stiffeners and six 60-hp Chief Agri centrifugal fans providing 1/10 cfm per bushel of aeration for corn. It also has six roof exhausters, a Greene Galvanized Stairs mid-roof walkaround, and 34 Tri-State Grain Conditioning temperature cables. Quad County Ag LLC erected the tank.

The new leg fills the tank through a 25,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyor sitting in a Chief Agri catwalk. The leg also feeds a new 10,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyor that goes back to the elevator’s concrete workhouse. The conveyor is supported by a 10-foot-x-10-foot-x-130-foot Chief Agri intermediate support tower.

Grain is reclaimed by a 10,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyor in a 6-foot-wide-x-8-foot high above ground tunnel back to the new leg. A Bin Gator 10,000-bph paddle-type bin sweep assists with the cleanout. There is no side draw off.

Edison, NE

At the coop’s 3-million-bushel shuttle train-loading facility in Edison, the reasoning was much the same. “We need to increase our dumping capacity,” says Krejdl, “plus we had some old steel tanks that were going to need repair.”

The project started with Blue River tearing down four 40-year steel tanks (1.2 million bushels total) adjacent to the elevator’s concrete workhouse. On that same footprint, Quad County Ag erected four new Chief Agri corrugated tanks, two 105-foot diameter and two 74-foot-diameter for a total of 2.1 million bushels.

The 105-foot tanks stand 107 feet at the eave and 134 feet at the peak, and each store 800,000 bushels. They each have outside stiffeners and four 40-hp Chief Agri centrifugal fans providing 1/10 cfm per bushel of aeration for corn. Each also has four roof exhausters, a Greene Galvanized Stairs mid-roof walkaround, and 24 Tri-States Grain Conditioning temperature cables.

The 74-foot tanks stand 114 feet at the eave and 132 feet at the peak and each store 415,000 bushels. The two tanks have outside stiffeners and four 30-hp Chief Agri centrifugal fans providing 1/10 cfm per bushel of aeration for corn. Each also has roof exhausters, a Greene Galvanized Stairs mid-roof walkaround, and 14 Tri-States Grain Conditioning temperature cables. The tanks don’t have side draw offs.

“The new tanks,” Krejdl says, “allow us to hold more grain and let us load and unload grain faster. Plus they are much safer for our employees.”

Like the Maywood project, Blue River installed a new Chief Agri two-hopper low-profile receiving system due to the site’s high-water table. Both hoppers feed two Chief Agri drag conveyors at 10,000-bph each. They then feed a new Chief Agri 20,000-bph drag conveyor going to a new Chief Agri 20,000-bph bucket elevator, sits inside a 14-foot-x-14-foot-x-150-foot Chief Agri support tower with switch-back stairs, and is outfitted with 16x8 Maxi-Lift Tiger Tuff low profile elevator buckets.

The new leg, which is situated between the two 74-foot tanks, fills each of these tanks through a 20,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyor. The 105-foot tanks are also filled with individual 20,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyors.

Grain is reclaimed from all four tanks via 10,000-bph Chief Agri drag conveyors located in a 6-foot-wide-x-8-foot-high above-ground tunnel back to the new leg. A Bin Gator 10,000-bph paddle-type bin sweep assists with the cleanout in each tank.

Grain can be reclaimed from three of the four tanks for truck loadout and all four tanks can supply grain back to the concrete workhouse for train loadout.

The facility can load 110-car unit-trains on a BNSF mainline at 50,000 bph in 15 hours. According to Krejdl, the corn train market has been slow for a couple of years, so the facility has been trucking corn to feed lots in Kansas and Oklahoma.