Open air grain storage in Frederick, Altus
I rode down to Frederick and Altus on Friday with Mark Hodges of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission because we had heard that farmers were dumping wheat on the ground because of lack of storage.
It was true.
In Frederick there was wheat piled outside the Tillman Producers Cooperative and in Altus at the Planters Co-op Association location there thousands of bushels were lying in open ground outside the grain elevator and next to the railroad tracks.
The problem? Grain elevator operators rely on railroads to provide railcars into which they can load grain and ship it to major grain terminals, which creates more local storage space. That’s key in what appears to be shaping up as a much larger wheat harvest than forecast.
So, elevator operators have run out of space and farmers have no choice but to dump it on the ground if they can’t truck it to elevators down in Texas.
In these photos, Hodges (top photo) poses at the base of the grain pile in Frederick, while Brent Cassidy of Cassidy Grain there stands outside a flat storage facility that was bulging at the sides and spilling grain out of the south doors (top photo below). We tried to get close enough to the large grain pile in Altus, but storm damage prevented us from getting there. Utility poles were down in every direction surrounding the co-op, and we couldn’t get through (bottom photo, below).
Jim Stafford
Business News Reporter
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