West Central, based in Ralston, Iowa, is located in a agricultural sweet spot with great harvests for both corn and soybeans. So much in fact, West Central announced a $27 million production, storage and receiving expansion scheduled for completion by the 2016 harvest.
Roger Fray, executive vice president for the grain side of West Central, spoke to Animal AgWired about how excited the company is and what the expansion means including additional capacity for grain storage and receiving. Fray explained that West Central is about an 80 million bushel storage capacity company and at Ralston specifically they can store just over 9 million bushels.
“The good problem that is starting to surface with the additional capacity along with handling a corn harvest here, having a shuttle business on the Union Pacific, various truck markets to ethanol plants, is what we’ve confirmed very clearly and that is we need some additional receiving and storage capacity,” said Fray.
The expansion will add about 20 million bushels of demand which translates into an additional 20,000 bushels per day of additional truck traffic. This will increase capacity to somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 bushels per hour, or between 600,000 to 700,000 bushels received per day.
What really drove the expansion? “We want to service the customer at the pace he wants to come out of the field,” said Fray.
Learn more about the expansion as well as how the project will increase per bushel bids by at least 5 cents by listening to Jamie Johansen’s interview with Roger Fray: Roger Fray Interview