savage grain elevators ship to the world

Since 1982 Clint Gergen has been terminal superintendent at the Cenex Harvest States grain terminal in Savage, and loves just about every minute of it. As the super, he watches grain coming into the facility via truck and rail, and going out via barge. A farmer by upbringing (he comes from a Dakota County farming family),

Gergen knows farmers well and talks their language. At the same time, he understands the machinery of his business — both the new-fangled process controls that run the operations and the old mechanical elevator systems with plenty of parts that wear out over time. He speaks with ease of his associations with people in the transport business.

“Our aim,” Gergen insists, “is to put the economy and the environment on the same track. People must eat, and in order to eat we must transport grain and other commodities as efficiently as possible via the intramodal transportation system we have in the States. For Midwest farmers in the heartland, who grow corn, soybeans, and small grains, it’s essential that they have access to world markets via the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers.”

In the case of the Savage terminal, 70 percent of the volume is corn, 20 percent soybeans, and 10 percent small grains, including wheat and barley.

The working, sweating river

Gergen shows us an impressive educational tape — Working River — put out by the St. Paul Port Authority in 1998. It reminds us of the many roles of the Mississippi (and by extension the Minnesota ), including drainage, flood control, esthetic solace, and, yes, economic engine. The film suggests that 60 percent of Upper Midwest grain is exported to world markets, and that barging is the cheapest way to move bulk cargo. In times like this, when petroleum-product prices are fluctuating, it’s important to squeeze every drop of fuel for efficiency. Note the advantage of water transportation, versus truck and train, in miles per gallon delivered:

Road, 59 mpg
Rail, 202 mpg
Water, 514 mpg

One barge holds the equivalent of 58 truckloads or 15 rail cars. And barges move in groups called tows, a typical tow with a capacity of 225 rail cars or 870 trucks.

Four heartland states — Minnesota , Wisconsin , Iowa and Illinois — produce nearly half of all corn and soybeans grown in the US. But the heartland is so far away from ports — whether West Coast, East Coast, or South — that farmers here depend absolutely on cost-efficient transportation down the Minnesota and Mississippi to New Orleans and then the world.

The Savage terminal was built in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Gergen tells us, and the first grain shipments went out in the spring of 1982, about the same time the Metrodome was inaugurated in Minneapolis. The terminal is located on Mile 14.5 of the Minnesota River, one of four elevators clustered there (the others are operated by Cargill and Bunge). As part of the transformation of the low land on which it stood, the elevator area was raised 12 to 15 feet with fill sand and 40 of the property’s 54 acres were dedicated to wildlife and wetland. Concrete footings were poured in the wetland area in the winter, and they now support a barge conveyor that goes a quarter mile from the elevator, over the wetland, to the loading dock. This conveyor can move 40,000 bushels of grain per hour, and load as many as 15 to 16 barges per day.

Since opening in 1982, says Gergen, the terminal has barged more than 1.2 billion barrels of grain, “the equivalent,” he says, getting into the spirit of statistical comparisons, “of over one million trucks, in six lanes, stretching from Savage to the mouth of the Mississippi River” (an awesome traffic-congestion image!).

A clean, well-lighted place

Gergen asks what visions we might have of a grain elevator. “Nope,” he says. “It’s nothing like that. We’re no old-time country elevator. We are fast, efficient, clean, safe, and automated. Not to mention good stewards of this land.”

Outside the operations building, he points out two truck dump platforms. They each have a 75-foot platform scale and a 60-ton hydraulic lift that raises trucks to 35 degrees, where they dump grain into 1,500-bushel pits below. These days, Gergen says, eighty percent of the terminal’s grain is brought by truck, the rest by rail. (Railroads have formed their own competing grain-transport business recently, some lines taking grain all the way from southwest Minnesota to New Orleans and the Gulf.)

Today is typical traffic for mid-May, with about 125 trucks coming through or $1.9 million worth of grain at current pricing. Sometime in June, when the navigational channel is in full swing, 500 to 700 trucks will be coming through each day. Each truck takes about five minutes to park, maneuver and unload into the pit.

Gergen takes us through the operations and elevator buildings, starting at the brains, the computer control room between the truck dumps. Here he shows us, as trucks are unloading below, how information like truck weight (full and then, after dumping, empty) is integrated and displayed in database management and Human Machine Interface systems. “Basically, these computers,” Gergen says, “start, stop and monitor our equipment. The HMI system interfaces many different aspects of the facility, from RPM meters to bearing monitors, and also talks to the database management system.” In fact, the systems tie in to the barge dock, a quarter of a mile away, where a computer monitor keeps track of the loading process.

The control tower also features a pneumatic tube that collects a grain sample from each truck and deposits it in a small burlap bag for onsite analysis. In the operations building grain inspection room, the grain samples are weighed, sorted and graded so farmers can be paid properly.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Gergen prompts, taking us outside and via freight elevator up to the top of the grain elevator. Here is a perfect view of the surrounding river valley, including the CHS wetland below, the conveyor crossing it, and the barge dock beyond. The other elevators cluster to east and west. Savage lies to the east, west, and south, and the river just to the north. In the bowels of the elevators below us, the grain is distributed and stored, temporarily, in 15 bins. Total capacity is 560,000 bushels, but typically about 250,000 bushels are held as inventory. During harvest season about 60 percent of all grain brought in by truck or rail is conveyed directly, without storing, to the barges.

Cheaper by the 9-foot channel

Now Gergen drives us to the dock in his pickup. There’s a tower at the slip, well above high water level, and an operator studying a monitor while a barge loads. The conveyor chute, directed into the barge, is spilling corn fast and furiously into the hold.

CHS rents barges from various barge suppliers. They come into the slip drawing just two feet of water, but when they’re loaded they can draw a full nine feet, the depth of the channel, when the river is at full height or more. (Today, because of recent rains, the river is riding a few inches above normal. But in low water conditions, the company loses money if it can’t fill barges to capacity, 1550–1650 tons.) “We also have to make sure the barges are loaded evenly,” says Gergen, “and then they’re towed downriver and assembled in 15-barge tows, growing to as many as 35 once they’re through the lock and dam system. This gives us the economies of scale that make barging such a competitive business and such a lifeline for the farmer.”

A well-fed world

Back in his office, Gergen delivers a paean to a well-fed world. “Barge traffic enables Midwest farmers and ranchers to reach out and help feed the world,” he asserts. Without operations such as CHS’s in Savage, many growers would be hard pressed to stay in business and compete on the world market. As it is, Gergen claims, they are pressured hard enough, for the US infrastructure is aging and emerging nations may be catching up. “It’s extremely important,” he suggests finally, “that we keep our intramodal system as healthy and vibrant as possible. That’s why the Corps of Engineers needs to keep the nine-foot channel clear, and why we need to keep improving transportation efficiencies.

“As crop yields increase — from 33 bushels of corn per acre in the 1920s to 150 bushels today — so our processing and transporting mechanisms need to keep up to speed. Everybody needs to pull together,” Gergen urges, to make sure our working river keeps on working … our prosperous country stays prosperous … and we all remain good stewards of the land.