Grain Journal May/June 09 : Page 31
For several years, the Harvest Land Cooperative grain elevator outside of Hagerstown, IN (765-489-4141), has been supplying corn to a Hills Pet Nutrition pet food processing plant in nearby Richmond, IN. Like most pet food producers, Hills is a demand- ing customer, with strict grade stan- dards. To make that job a little easier, Harvest Land spent about $3.2 mil- lion in 2007 and 2008 to build a steel annex that includes some features more commonly associated with feed mills. The annex includes a 735,000- bushel Brock corrugated steel tank and a truck receiving and loadout shed. The shed includes four 8,000- bushel and one 1,500-bushel over- head Baker-Rullman square steel bins. After taking bids, Harvest Land awarded the construction project to Rebsco Inc., Greenville, OH (937- 548-2246), which has done numer- ous projects for the cooperative in the past, according to Hagerstown Man- ager Butch Shiebla, a 20-year veteran employee. Construction broke ground in May 2008, and the facility was ready in time for fall harvest. The Annex The Brock tank stands 105 feet in diameter, 91 feet tall at the eaves, and 119 feet tall at the peak. The tank has outside stiffeners, flat bottom, 16- inch Brock Sweepmaster sweep auger, 24-cable Safe-Grain temperature monitoring system, and level indica- tors from Monitor Technologies. A set of four 30-hp Brock centrifu- gal fans and 10 roof exhausters per tank provide 1/7 cfm per bushel of aeration through in-floor ducting in a 4-F pattern. The receiving and loadout shed encloses a 650-bushel mechanical re- ceiving pit, which is outfitted with magnets from Industrial Magnetics to remove metal, a must for supplying the pet food industry. The pit feeds a 20,000-bph InterSystems leg equipped with 20x8 heavy-duty Maxi-Lift CC Max low- profile buckets mounted on a 21-inch Goodyear PVC belt. The leg towers more than 200 feet tall, which provides the LeMar tower enough space to enclose a 20,000-bph InterSystems gravity cleaner and two separate Schlagel electronic distribu- tors. The higher of the two distribu- tors is a six-hole swing type model, which can feed a 20,000-bph InterSystems drag conveyor running to the Brock tank or drop it into an eight-hole rotary distributor serving the loadout system. The Brock tank empties onto a 10,000-bph InterSystems reclaim drag conveyor in a below-ground tun- nel that runs back to the leg. The loadout distributor feeds the four overhead loadout bins, which are equipped with Abel slide gates for on- the-go blending. “It’s made life a lot easier,” Shiebla says of the new annex. “We can cer- tify the grade and test corn samples for aflatoxin, then have it in the loadout bins ready to go first thing the next morning.” Ed Zdrojewski, editor Response No. 311 M/J GJ 31
