I burn mostly corn as the price is very low in the area we live in. $100. a ton for the last few years. I'm not a spring chicken anymore and my wife has a 25 lb lifting limit so we decided to automate the corn handling chores to some degree. We used to store corn in 50 gallon barrels however it was a lot of manual labor handling the fuel several times. I thought I'd share some pics of what works for us.
Thumbs up on the above system! I wish I had the extra room in basement. You found a way to help you handling the fuel to a T which is the way to go about doing things
What's the moisture content of that stuff? Assuming it's dried when harvested then put in storage? Amazing that you can get it for $100 a ton after all the processing. Nice set up!!!
Moisture content varies from year to year, I purchase year old corn that is dryer than the new crop, It is about 9 & this year. It is harvested usually at about 15% and then air dried with blowers on the storage bin and heated some depending on the weather. I sort of feel sad for the corn producers because they are selling the corn under the cost of production in this area.
Blower helps a lot, (if you look on the far side of the barrel you can see the junk) Cleaning the corn is still a bottle neck and needs to be improved on you can't see it in the picture but there is a screen in the barrel as well as the blower. I have a Corn Vac however it is very slow, It took me over 7 hours to unload the wagon with it last year, this year using a 4 inch auger with the screen and blower it took an hour and a half. However I would like the corn a bit cleaner. I purchase corn from local farmers some is clean enough to put directly into the furnace some needs a lot of cleaning. Just depends on the combine and operator. The Corn Vac gets the corn real clean, The bag in the vacuum plugs very quickly, I would say about 300 lbs and you need to clean the bag and vacuum. Also you need to constantly fiddle with the pickup hose, if it is to deep in the corn then the air flow is restricted and the corn doesn't move to high and it sucks the corn up and then nothing moves, also the screen in the corn vac plugs up quickly if you have very much light stuff in the corn. also it takes a LOT of vacuum to make it work.
That is a very reasonable cost of production, I looked up the cost of production for a bushel of corn at the university of Iowa and it was over $4 a bushel in this area. Estimated Costs of Crop Production in Iowa - 2016 is where I looked it up there is a link at the bottom of the page that downloads a small pdf that breaks it down.
They have $32 p/a in drying & $12 in insurance I don't have. Along with $40 in bloat (intrest & labor). But the biggie is rent @ $266. If you're paying that for land it better be capable of growing 250 bu not 180. And using 250 puts break even @ $2.80 even with the other bloat.
Out here in Oz we have seen the best cropping year EVER. Prices are way down due to a world glut of grains but the massive yields are compensating for that. Normaly we clean and sell the olive pit fuel but wheat is so cheap and so high in energy this year that wheat will be the staple. Corn is still too dear and too far away.
