Noah Lee, Mississippi State University

Hello, my name is Noah, and I am from Peoria, a Junior majoring in Poultry Science at Mississippi State University. Before going on GFAI’s tour and job shadowing, I did not know much about how elevators make money or condition grain, so I decided to shadow Charlie, an Elevator manager at Akron Services’ Brimfield location, which has over 4 million bushels of storage capacity. The first day, he showed me around the facility and talked about how they store and sell grain, as well as sell dry fertilizer, operate a truck shop, truck wash, and store feed there. I watched him load semis bound for Pekin’s Alto ICP Ethanol plant. He told me about how most of the corn in Peoria County winds up there or at BioUrja in Peoria, another Ethanol Plant. He said that they ship corn to both of those places until they are done buying for the week, which usually happens on Thursday. Then on Fridays, they ship beans, which usually end up at ADM in Creve Coeur to be loaded on barges, but they will haul to whoever has the best prices. It was August, so Charlie was working on cleaning the bins out to get ready for fall, and moving corn around in one bin to make a funnel to put wet corn in once harvest starts before it can be dried. He told me Brimfield was Akron’s elevator that had to store the carryover corn this fall that farmers still retained ownership of. The next year the elevators would rotate on who had to store the carryover grain. 
The second day, he was still loading trucks bound for Pekin, meanwhile the maintenance man was working on replacing a guardrail on top of the cat walk above one of the dryers. It was impressive to me how he could weld a heavy piece of steel like that at a hundred feet in the air. Charlie talked about grain bin safety as well and how he does not let anyone go in a bin except him, and he has someone outside in case something goes wrong. We also talked about how trucks have to be loaded in all kinds of weather, and how he works long hours in the fall to make sure farmers can dump their grain and get back to harvesting. At the end of my second day, I talked to the truck dispatcher because I was curious how he manages so many trucks, including both company and outside trucks. He said he likes to keep the outside trucks coming to Akrons’ elevators, because they are paid by the load and can get loaded faster at the elevator, but sends most of the company drivers who are paid by the hour to farm jobs which can take longer. This way he can keep outside drivers happy and keep their business. In the end, it was a valuable experience to me, as I got to see what Charlie does on a daily basis, and got to see all of the hard work that goes into storing and shipping grain between arrival and whenever it is shipped to the end market.