When you see southwest Kansas down to Amarillo, Tex. from the air (or Google Maps), a distance of 150 miles, you see thousands of center-pivot circles. The pivots were installed to grow corn for the beef-cattle industry, the huge feed yards that are located in this part of the U.S. It’s not unusual to see 100,000-head-capacity yards in this region. It became a “cattle magnet” with the construction of the IBP kill facility at Amarillo in the early 1970s.
Why here? Because of few people, water from the Ogallala aquifer, cheap natural gas to power the wells, and a plentiful supply of feeder cattle from Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico ranchers.
This heavily irrigated part of the Great Plains, and the crops that are now grown there, will be changing as drastically as any agricultural region in the U.S.
Why? “The cows are coming!” It’s is one of the two major areas to where California dairy cows are being relocated.
Why? Water issues and concerns about methane emissions in California.
In anticipation of all these dairy cows, new cheese plants have been built in Dalhart and Lubbock, Tex. and in Dodge City, Kan.
The other area where California cows are moving is the Columbia Valley of the Pacific Northwest. And to point out what most folks don’t realize—California, not Wisconsin or Minnesota, has been the number-one dairy state for more than 30 years.
Tillotson elevator at Rolla, Kan., 1948Rolla in more recent times
Here’s the change: When the cows move in, farmers tend to switch to growing forages rather than corn. It means alfalfa, grass mixtures, and specific corn varieties for silage rather than grain. They’re important for proper nutrition for dairy cows, high in protein (especially alfalfa) and the roughage is great for a ruminant. An acre of forage crop can produce about twice the biomass as compared to corn. On top of that, forage production uses significantly less water than irrigated corn. And on top of this, forages can’t be shipped in by train. An AI overview explains:
Forage crops like hay and silage are rarely shipped by train because they are bulky, have a low financial value per pound, and spoil or catch fire easily if handled or stored incorrectly over long distances. Trucks offer a faster, door-to-door option for regional deliveries where rail lines do not go.
Tillotson’s elevator at Ensign, Kan.
Corn, and lots of it, will be imported into this market, as it has been to California. The beef cattle are still there and corn will supplement the dairies’ rations. That’s why there has been a big push to build train-unloaders. JDH (formerly J.D. Heiskel & Co.), 5V, a joint venture between Five Rivers Cattle Feeding and Viserion Grain, and Viterra, which on July 2 merged with Bunge, are building shuttle unloaders in this market. The Andersons, of Maumee, Ohio, purchased ADM’s interest in Skyland Grain for the same reason.
We’ll see rather quickly the change in cropping patterns. I suspect these changes will move all the way to Dodge City, Kan. and beyond.
And, yes, it will dramatically impact the grain elevators in this market.
By one analysis, the trend nowadays is toward a leaner connection between farmers and export markets. By loading grain-only unit trains at facilities close to home, farmers can avoid the step of sending their grain to terminal elevators in port cities. Here, contributor Brad Perry taps his career in banking and finance to share some reflections on the increasingly large scale of elevator facilities in keeping with demand for more efficient grain handling.
Brad: Through the 1970s, we were still building 250,000-bushel workhouses and 500,000-bushel annexes, with 18- to 24-foot-diameter bins. These were being built by Jarvis, Quad States, Jordan, Mid States, and a few others. That makes me really appreciate the 354,000-bushel houses your family built in 1954.
Ronald: They built 350,000 bushels at Farnsworth, Tex. in 1946!
Brad: Farmers Coop Business Association, of Shelby, Neb. built maybe the first “corn-soybean” elevator in Nebraska. It had 750,000 bushel capacity, four tanks measuring 48 feet in diameter with interstices. It was designed for export unit-train loading. This was followed by the Tamora-Staplehurst Cooperative (in Seward County, Neb.) building a 1-million-plus-bushel facility. After that, it took us a while, but we figured out that larger bins maybe made sense! Now as you look across Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota, you see 105-foot-diameter steel bins of 750,000-bushel capacity and now 120-foot-diameter bins (1.2 million plus). For concrete, Tamora, Neb. is a great example. Hooked to the elevator is a 400,000-bushel tank, a 600,000-bushel tank, and now a 1-million-bushel tank.
Tillotson’s classic elevator at Pocahontas, Iowa, by Brad Perry
Brad: It’s been much more difficult for Kansas cooperatives to unify for the benefit of their producer-owners. There are several reasons including the terminal grain structure. There is plenty of shipping capacity for trains in Kansas, but it’s at the terminal rather than close to the producer. This has been changing with the new shuttle loaders that have been built in the state. Some of the most significant ones (Courtland, Frankfort, Hanover, Canton) were either built by Nebraska cooperatives or as joint ventures with larger companies.
Ronald: I’m turning to the internet for a definition: A shuttle loader is a high-capacity industrial machine used to rapidly transfer bulk materials such as grain into 100-car freight trains. Here’s the link to a scholarly paper co-authored by CoBank Research Fellow Mykel Taylor of Kansas State University that addresses the question of efficiency.
Brad: I was involved with four grain-marketing LLCs and joint ventures where several cooperatives combined their grain operations into a single license. A central staff did all of the merchandising, set the bids, did the grain accounting and managed grain flows. Net grain revenues were then passed back to the member-owner cooperatives based on bushels handled at each facility. These organizations were AgMark at Concordia, Kan., Team Marketing at Moundridge, Kan., CoMark in southern Kansas, and Equity Marketing Alliance at Enid, Okla. AgMark still exists, with CVA (Central Valley Ag) at York, Neb. as the dominant owner. Team Marketing has dissolved. CoMark and Equity Marketing have merged. In hindsight, while the groups substantially improved producers’ grain bids and cooperative earnings, they also allowed the member-cooperatives to resist change.
Rail car mover
Ronald: What strikes me is that the elevators themselves are the emblems of these organizations that otherwise have few physical manifestations.
Brad: There was another joint marketing group proposed for western Kansas. This included the cooperatives at Syracuse, Johnson, Elkhart, and Ulysses. The entity that materialized from those discussions was similar … but different. ADM Grain got involved and a whole new structure evolved that included the cooperatives (less Elkhart) and what were ADM/Collingwood facilities in western and southwestern Kansas. This included the ADM facilities in Johnson’s trade area, and a bunch further south, including Hugoton, the seat of Stevens County. Over time, several more cooperatives merged in.
Trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photoMore trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photo
Brad: I was told once that it took as many as 12 employees to load a train at one of the monster Kansas terminals. That means one in the locomotive or a smaller car mover; another two or three opening and then closing car hatches; two others in the headhouse running a hopper scale that prints tickets; a grader; one boss supervising everything; and at least four on bicycles in the tunnel beneath the storage annex. The tunnel guys are getting their instructions via radio from the boss, and being told, “Crack open bin 118 a quarter turn.” They are actually blending coming out of the annex bins onto the belt. It takes several days to load a 110-car train out of most of these monsters.
Ronald: You had mentioned in a previous discussion that, at the country elevators, it was a couple of boxcars at a time.
Brad: Modern train loaders? Three or maybe four employees load a 110-car train in 12 hours. There’s one in the locomotive, one or 2 opening and closing hatches, and one in a control booth half-way up the side of the elevator. If it’s being shipped with origin USDA grades, then there is also a USDA grader on site. The employee in the booth is controlling the entire elevator— legs, gates, conveyors, etc.
Ronald: In a photo I took at Springfield, Colo., I didn’t know what to call the grotesque appendage at the end of the annex, marring the beautiful Tillotson elevator. This appendage incorporated a booth. You informed me it was for grain loading.
Ronald: You were impressed when reader Michael Petersen utilized AI to I.D. the unlabeled photo of an elevator, which turned out to be Tillotson’s job at Helena, Okla.
Brad: Glad the Helena mystery was solved! I looked— been there but didn’t have any pictures. The current view from Google Earth is very typical of Kansas and Oklahoma elevators. The co-op added a McPherson jump-form tank at the end and put a leg and another dump between the annex and McPherson tank. The tank is probably 200,000 to 250,000 capacity. I’m betting the leg is either 7,500 or 10,000 bushels per hour.
Ronald: Some additional studies of the construction record show that Tillotson returned twice to Helena, each time to build more storage.
Brad: This high-speed approach has been both good and bad. It’s the standard approach that companies like Scoular have used to upgrade to shuttle-train-loading capability. In their case, it’s normally a 30,000-bph leg with a bulk weigher. You can see this at Downs, in north-central Kansas, Venango in southwestern Nebraska, and additional locations. The bad side is, many slip-formed tubes weren’t designed with enough bearing pressure for this speed of loading. I’ve seen major holes blown right out through the side of the tube that these higher capacity legs were dumping into.
Editor’s note: Our post on the Mayer-Osborn elevator at Pritchett, Colo.–part of the Utah-Colorado-Kansas 2026 Road Trip series–referred to the Hart-Bartlett-Sturtevant Grain Co., whose name is seen in the above photo. Here, as a companion piece in the series, we present more information on Bartlett from that organization.
By Brad Perry, Contributing Writer
Bartlett & Company of Kansas City, Mo.–along with Garvey Grain Company of Wichita, Kan. and a few more family companies–has long been a major player in the Kansas wheat business. Bartlett & Co. was founded in 1907 and operated independently until 2018.
Kansas had more than its share of players, both co-ops and others, due to a couple of reasons.
First, wheat moved through terminal markets. The terminal normally had Class 9 (high-speed) status with the railroads, and were served by multiple rails. Many terminals were paid for with Commodity Credit Corporation storage contracts.
Second, hard red winter wheat (HRW) had and still has two markets: bread flour and exports. Add to this the fact that until the 1970s, most grain was shipped in 40-foot boxcars and as single cars–not today’s unit trains comprising car after car of the same thing. Flour mills had neither the storage capacity nor the land space to handle trains. Most still don’t.
This multi-layered distribution system gave tons of opportunity to generate margins, particularly as compared to feed grains and soybeans. Corn, milo, and soybeans didn’t need–nor rely on–terminal elevators for their markets. Instead, these harvests went to the end-user directly. That accelerated when the rails started with special rates for 25, then 75, and now 110 cars. Even the transport and processing of wheat is starting to change—several new flour mills from Grand Forks, N.D. to Guadalajara, Mexico now can handle large trains.
With the wheat margin potential, Kansas has always had lots of intermediate players. The “traditionals” have included Cargill, ADM/Collingwood, and Scoular. Quite a few “internationals” such as Ferruzzi Group, Garnac Grain Co., and Bunge Global have also been involved.
Bartlett was one of the traditionals. Then and now, it has operated country elevators as well as terminals in Kansas City, Wichita, and St. Joseph, Mo. Garvey was another traditional, as was DeBruce Grain, Inc., of Kansas City, and even Koch Industries of Wichita.
In one way or another, they are about gone. In 2018, Bartlett sold out to the Savage Group, a logistics company in Salt Lake City. (Officially, it was a $2 billion merger.) DeBruce bought some of Garvey’s assets–notably Haysville, Kan.–and then became a part of Gavilon LLC. Accelerating these changes is the construction of new train-capable elevators in Kansas. These new loaders eliminate the need for terminals elevators, taking links out of the supply chain.
Last issue as an example is the Far-Mar-Co elevator in Hutchinson, which is now ADM’s Elevator J. It’s the one that’s a half-mile long. In my career I can name eight different owners of that facility. There is close to 100 million bushels of space in Hutch in a market that grows near 10,000,000 bushels of wheat and corn.
With a small crop, and decent exports for wheat this year, we’ll see a bunch of empty space at the terminals.
Tillotson Construction Co. was one of several organizations that welcomed Nixon Truck Grain Market at 27th and O Streets in a Dec. 1, 1938 Omaha Daily Journal-Stockman ad. “Let good construction and equipment increase your profits,” the Tillotson ad line advised.
Just 30 days later, another paper, The Daily Record, carried the brief notice of a leasing agreement between A.A. Nixon & Co. and Tillotson for machinery and equipment. Value of the lease was $1,808.24.
With questions on why a prosperous company like Nixon would lease, we tabbed Brad Perry, who’s a good friend of Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, to explain. Brad has had a career in finance, which he described in an email:
With the Farm Credit meltdown of the mid 1980’s, the 12 District Banks for cooperatives merged with the central Bank for Cooperatives, headquartered in Denver. Then it was renamed CoBank.
More history: There were 12 Farm Credit Districts, roughly similar to the Federal Reserve Districts. Each District had a Federal Land Bank with local Land Bank Associations, a Federal Intermediate Credit Bank with Production Credit Associations, and a Bank for Coops (BC). The central bank handled the large loans that exceeded the District Banks for Coops’ lending limits.
All this changed after the farm crisis of the late 1980’s. There are now a total of six District Banks, including CoBank.
I was at the Omaha BC from 1975 to 1987. In 1980, OBC started a consulting company to work with coops in our District, which was Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. At the depth of the farm crisis, I took the consulting company private. I’m still trying to fully retire, but have a couple clients I can’t say no to!
Q. Was it customary to lease machinery and equipment from the builder of an elevator?
A. I’m betting that the elevator’s owner didn’t have adequate funds to pay for everything, so the equipment was leased to him/her. That was not unusual. Why the equipment? It could be pulled out and re-sold.
Q. It looks like individual grain merchants like Nixon monopolized the market in grain distribution.
A. You’re about right on the grain merchants and monopolizing the grain business. The primary one was Cargill, along with the flour millers. Pillsbury, Washburn (Gold Medal), and so on. On the Northern Plains, there was also Peavey. Most of them were in cahoots with the railroads. There really wasn’t any government action that broke them up, but their predatory pricing. That gave rise to farmer-organized cooperatives and locally owned grain companies. The federal government did come in to the grain business in the early 1930s–the Great Depression. They created the Federal Grain Company to buy surplus stocks, i.e. wheat. Some of those elevators still stand and are still in use.
Q. It also looks like we’ll be on the road in a few weeks, and that could lead through southwestern Kansas, where Tillotson built elevators in a string of small towns.
A. On your Kansas trip, southern Kansas has some of the oldest concrete elevators in the country. All were built for wheat. As you know, there are mammoth elevators in Salina, Hutchinson, Topeka, and Wichita–particularly Haysville just South of Wichita. On or within 25 miles of U.S. 81/I-35 are four of the five largest elevators in the world. These are in Salina, Hutchinson, Haysville, and Enid, Okla. All were paid for by Commodity Credit Corporation storage payments.
Q. Besides the bountiful grain production, why are they concentrated there?
A. It was not unusual for wheat to be stored as long as 10 years. All wheat into the “terminals” came in 40-foot boxcars from area elevators. You’ll notice larger elevators the farther west you get. Notice Dodge City. It was too far away from the terminals, so they built more storage locally. You’ll see the same in Garden City, Ulysses, and other southwest Kansas towns.
In Nebraska, many of the 12,000- to 18,000-bushel wood elevators got turned into feed mills, mainly for cattle feed. Most of these elevators had a roller mill in the basement and made a decent feed mill due to their small bins. An example from Walthill, Nebr. is seen in the photo above.
Halbur, Iowa mill
Dodge, Nebr.Oakland, Iowa
In Iowa, this was less common due to more hogs than cattle. Swine feeds tended to be more complex with more ingredients than cattle feed.
Feed mills were still being built of wood in Iowa up until the 1960s.
Quad States Construction, out of Des Moines, Iowa, got started building wood feed mills and then became a major builder of concrete elevators and annex tanks.
When I started with the Omaha Bank for Cooperatives in 1975, my accounts were the co-ops north of Interstate 80. One was Tekamah, Nebr., where Farmers Elevator was in grain and feed. I was told this was the last wood elevator built in Nebraska.
It was huge for a wood house — 100,000-bushel capacity. I was also told they went with wood due to poor soil conditions. You can still see it on Google Earth. It’s the big one on the left.
Editor’s note: The poor soil conditions may have led to a heavy concrete elevator settling.
This June 29, 1961 article from the Burt County Plaindealer describes the new twin-leg elevator that would soon open with all the modern fittings found in a concrete elevator.
The very last wood house we financed at OBC was for the co-op at Sisseton, S.D. It’s still in use and holds 60,000 bushels.
I can remember it cost $6 per bushel ($360,000) when a 250,000-bushel concrete house was $500,000.
Minnesota and North Dakota stayed with wood longer than anywhere else because of their cold weather. They built as much as 250,000-bushel wood houses. Wood is a much better insulator than concrete and does not have condensation issues.
Brad Perry shares another photo of an early Cargill elevator, this one at Ashton, S.D. As the Dakota Territory surrendered its prairie to agriculture in the 1880s, grain traders like Cargill expanded north and west. The initial heavy harvests from the rich earth raised demand for storage.
Our friend, Brad Perry, saw the recent posts about Cargill history and was prompted to send some of his photos.
“The Bagley name still shows up in South Dakota along U.S. 12,” Perry notes. This elevator turns up in an online source that says the location is Andover, just east of Aberdeen.
“George C[olt]. Bagley was a member of a grain-trading family in eastern Wisconsin,” Wayne G. Broehl, Jr. writes in his massive history of Cargill.
In the early 1880s, Wisconsin farmers were moving out of wheat and into livestock, so Bagley betook himself to South Dakota and partnered with Sylvester Cargill, one of the five Cargill brothers.
Broehl continues:
Most of the Bagley & Cargill operations were in that part of the Dakota territory that later became the northeastern section of South Dakota. Similar to Jim Cargill’s larger-capacity operations in the Red River Valley, the Bagley & Cargill’s 13 structures at the firms 10 locations were more substantial (although only one was classified as an elevator.) This elevator, at Aberdeen, had a capacity of 25,000 bushels; the Andover warehouse had the same; the Groton operation had an 18,000-bushel capacity and the Bath warehouse, 15,000.
An extensive biography of Bagley says the company concentrated on towns along the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad.
The partnership lasted “only a short time.” Bagley’s wife, Cornelia, would later recall, “Ves Cargill [Sylvester] was a partner but George could not put up with his suspicion of all deals and bought him out.”
Our friend, Brad Perry, saw the recent posts about Cargill history and was prompted to send some of his photos.
Here he shows us one of Cargill’s early concrete elevators. It’s located in Elmore, Minn., a tiny town in Faribault County, in the south-central part of the state right on the Iowa line.
As railroads pushed west in the 1870s, Will Cargill expanded his grain storage along the lines through northern Iowa and southern Minnesota.
And as the era of reinforced-concrete elevators unfolded, Cargill’s successors continued building.
We don’t know a thing about this elevator’s dimensions or who might have built it, but how impressive is the wooden elevator on the right? It stands almost shoulder to shoulder with the more modern concrete one.
