Practical articles on grain elevator management — written for operators who have a scale house to run.
A farmer sold her stored corn to another buyer and needs it moved. It’s a withdrawal, not a sale: the bushels come off her balance by the scale ticket, the slip says so, and her unpaid bills show up before the truck leaves.
Read article →Out of room, so your own grain goes to another elevator. Know what you have at each facility, check their slip against your scale, and pay the trucker on what they credited.
Read article →The last truck tips a 2,600 bu contract to 2,760. Carry the extra to the farmer’s next contract, pay it at this one’s price, or move it to storage. You choose at settlement, and the sheets say what you chose.
Read article →Grain went into storage before the contract was signed. Pick the contract when you sell from storage, and the stored grain fills it at the contract price. Settlement pays only what came across the scale.
Read article →“Can you get me my bushels by field?” One PDF per customer and crop year: every load by FSA farm, tract, and field, with bushels per acre worked out. Plus one Reports button on every customer card, so nobody has to hunt for it.
Read article →The truck is on the deck. Press PRINT on the indicator, click Capture, and the gross weight lands on the ticket — once. Avery Weigh-Tronix scales, one analyzer sample per load, ticket numbers that count per customer, and a close that refuses a bad weight: what changed on the terminal before harvest.
Read article →A flat-price contract locks everything at signing. Basis and hedge-to-arrive each lock half, and the grain comes in weeks before the farmer makes the call on the other leg. Here is how Horizon Grain tracks, prices, and settles them — and who owns the grain in the bin meanwhile.
Read article →A load closed under the wrong name in September, found when the customer calls about his balance in November. Corrections at a country elevator have to be possible, visible, and safe — without quietly breaking three other numbers on the way through.
Read article →The truck leaves Tuesday. The settlement sheet naming the contract shows up Friday. For three days you can either guess at the contract or leave the load off the books — and both of those are how a bin that reads 40,000 bushels turns out to hold 31,000.
Read article →Most country elevators track hauler payables on a whiteboard or a shared spreadsheet. For a hauler running 30–50 loads in a pay cycle, reconciling what he is owed takes 1–2 hours per cycle, every cycle. Horizon Grain tracks it automatically as loads are logged.
Read article →A loss adjuster asking for field-level delivery records is not a rare event anymore. Most small elevators answer that call by pulling a stack of paper tickets. The records can exist before the call ever comes.
Read article →Most small elevators can write a forward contract in five minutes. Tracking whether it actually gets delivered — across dozens of loads over weeks — is where the wheels come off. Here is how Horizon Grain handles it.
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