Revolutionizing Grain Storage: A Peek into MKC and Producer Ag’s Innovative Facilities

My name is John Brown. I am the director of facilities for all of MKC properties and producer ag. This facility here is a originally built in two thousand fourteen. It was a truck house of roughly one point two million bushels of upright storage and then a, bunker beside it. And we've added roughly, another three point one million bushels of storage in two thousand and twenty four. I'm the, project manager for this project, and we had CASA involved from day one in two thousand fourteen, which what that's what we called a level three automation. And when we when you go to a rail terminal facility, we shoot for level five, which is pretty much every horn and whistle. And we had to work with Casa again. We wanted to work with Casa again. We've been using Casa software since two thousand and thirteen. We think the Casa control systems is easy to use. It's very well supported by the technicians. The onboarding system that they do when they actually install the system, when they're ready to hand it over to us, it's in it's in working condition with no flaws. This system has been performing, great so far. Just like the other ones, it it really increases the speed and the efficiency. We can load up to a hundred and twenty cars at one time, and that'd be number one rail cars. And it takes us about six hours to do that. Is our facility faster than most other facilities loading? I would say industry wide, absolutely. MKC producer ag, no. This is kind of our standard that, we're loading at eighty to a hundred thousand bushels an hour, where I know neighboring loaders just down the road take twelve, thirteen hours to load, and we're knocking it out in less than six. I was involved in the sales process with Casa, and the experience was good. As as always, you know, MKC, we we do we we're price sensitive. We shop. But when it comes to automation, it's one of those things if we have a good working relationship and, trusted partner, and we're happy with that.