Controlling the Logistics

Garden City Coop

Started: 1919

Headquarters: Garden City, KS

Total Grain Storage Capacity: 37+ million bushels at 21 country elevators and 1 terminal

Annual Sales: $250 million

Number of Members: 1,400

Crops Handled: Soybean, hard red winter wheat, hard white winter wheat, milo, and corn

Key Personnel
Jeff Boyd, CEO/President
Kelly Drees, CFO
Michael Wisner, VP Grain
Grant Geyer, Director of Grain Operations
Tiffany Harmon, Safety Director

Things are changing in the grain industry in southwest Kansas, says Garden City Coop (GCC) CEO/President Jeff Boyd.

Drought, less irrigation, and more forage are cutting into corn production, he says. Add in two new gluten plants in central Kansas and more wheat is going north than to traditional mill markets.

“We’ve generally always been a deficit corn area,” explains Boyd, “but there have been more pricing opportunities to truck and rail corn in from outside the area. With all the feedlots, dairy, and swine production in our area, there is a strong feed grain demand and more of that demand is being sourced outside our local area.

These changes, says Boyd, meant the 3,400-member cooperative based in Garden City, KS, needed to diversify to gain more control of its destiny by controlling logistics.

To gain that control, GCC started discussing the idea for a shuttle-loading facility with a loop track in 2021.

The coop bought a 160-acre site in nearby Holcomb, KS, and began a plan to build a shuttle-loading facility that was flexible, fast, and highly automated.

“We wanted a facility with a fast traffic flow, the flexibility to load and unload railcars and trucks at the same time while handling multiple crops, and a great deal of automation to minimize labor,” says Boyd, who has been with the coop for 22 years and the CEO/president for six years.

In 2022, the coop’s board approved a plan to build the River Valley Grain Terminal, a 1.2 million bushel facility in Holcomb. The coop selected Buresh Building Systems, Hampton, IA, to be the project’s design/building contractor.

Boyd says Buresh was good to work with for the design/build process. “Throughout the project,” he says, “they were very available, and communication as good.”

Other key suppliers included:

-Empire Ag to build the concrete workhouse.

-VAA, LLC to provide civil engineering.

-KC Engineering to provide structural and slip observation services.

-Ameritrack Rail to build the loop track.

Construction on the project started in December 2022 and the first load of grain was received in August 2024.

Concrete Workhouse

The centerpiece of the project is a new 1.2-million-bushel concrete workhouse built by Empire Ag, Ankeny, IA. The workhouse has six 42-foot-x-148-foot slipform tanks (170,000 bushels each) with two interstice bins (40,000 bushels each) and one bubble bin (8,000 bushels).

Each tank has one AGI 50-hp centrifugal fan supplying a minimum of 1/10 cfm per bushel per tank along with two 2-hp powered roof exhausters and three AGI CMC grain temperature system cables.

For unloading, each tank has a directional air unloading floor system installed by Drake, Inc.

The site’s traffic flow is designed with both an inbound and outbound truck scale for one-way traffic. As trucks enter the site, they are sampled by a GSI truck probe and weighed by a Mettler Toledo 14-foot-x-80-foot truck scale. Once weighed and sampled, trucks drive 100 yards to a 100-foot-x-66-foot steel receiving shed which has two 12-foot-x-32-foot receiving pits, each able to hold 1,800 bushels. A CamCorp dust collection system keeps the pits clean. The system also collects dust at the bucket elevators and rail loadout spout.

Once the grain is dumped, each pit feeds two bucket elevators via a GSI 20,000-bph drag conveyor. All four of the legs were manufactured by GSI with Continental belts supplied by Applied Power Products. Two of the legs are 20,000-bph, each with two rows of 12x8 Maxi-Lift CC-MAX elevator buckets on a 27-inch belt. The other two legs are 30,000-bph each with two rows of 18x8 Maxi-Lift CC-MAX elevator buckets on a 39-inch belt. The legs are located in a 40-foot deep boot pit.

Once grain is elevated, it flows into one of two Schlagel distributors, one a 24-inch, five-duct double inlet swingset and the other a 20-inch, six-duct double inlet swingset, before dropping into one of four GSI drag conveyors for filling the tanks.

There are two 20,000-bph drag conveyors on the east side and two 30,000-bph on the west side of the bin roof. The conveyors sit in a Warrior Mfg. 18-foot-wide-x-97-foot-long catwalk set 7 feet above the bin roof. Any of the four conveyors can fill any of the six main tanks.

For reclaim, grain drops into an 80,000-bph GSI belt conveyor in a 11-foot-x-8-foot underground tunnel and is moved to the four bucket elevators. Grain passes through two 40,000-bph GSI screeners prior to filling the bulk weigher, located in a 20-foot-x-20-foot concrete slipform building, at any combination of 20,000-, 40,000-, 50,000-, or 80,000-bph. It can load or unload a 116-car unit train in fewer than eight hours.

The 160-acre site includes an 8,100-foot loop track for continuous loading or unloading of unit trains. While loading railcars, the facility utilizes a five-car TriTech fall protection system. A compressed Air Systems hopper car gate opener assists with rail unloading.

Two Meridian 6,000-bushel smooth-wall hopper bins are used for truck loadout.

A Schumacher Elevator four-person, 750-pound special purpose personnel manlift was installed to provide access to the concrete tanks roof top and to the bucket elevator head sections.

SUPPLIER LIST

AERATION FANS: AGI
AERATION SYSTEM INSTALL: Drake Inc.
BEARING SENSORS: AGI
BUCKET ELEVATORS: GSI
BULK WEIGH SCALE: GSI
CATWALK: Warrior Mfg. LLC
CLEANER: GSI
CONCRETE TANK BUILDER: Empire Ag
CONTRACTOR: Buresh Building Systems
CONTROL SYSTEM: Boss Automation
CONVEYORS (drag and belt): AGI
DISTRIBUTOR: Schlagel Inc.
DUST COLLECTION SYSTEM: Camcorp, Inc.
DUST FILTERS: Camcorp, Inc.
ELECTRIC CONTRACTOR: Davis Electric
ELEVATOR BUCKETS: Maxi-Lift, Inc.
ENGINEERING: VAA LLC
FALL PROTECTION SYSTEMS: Tri-Tech Fall Protection
GATES/VALVES: Schlagel Inc.
GRAIN TEMPERATURE SYSTEM: AGI
LEG BELTING: Continental Applied Power Products
LEVEL INDICATORS: Bindicator
LOADOUT TANKS: Meridian
MANLIFT: Schumacher Elevator Co.
MILLWRIGHT: Buresh Building Systems
MOTION SENSORS: AGI
RAILCAR GATE OPENERS: Compressed Air Systems
RAIL LOOP TRACK: Ameritrack
SAMPLERS: GSI
SPEED REDUCERS:  Dodge Industrial
STEEL BUILDINGS: Nucor
TOWER SUPPORT SYSTEM: Warrior Mfg. LLC
TRUCK PROBE: GSI
TRUCK SCALES: Mettler-Toledo

From the Nov/Dec 2024 Issue of Grain Journal