Ask about drying charges: it can make a big difference, elevator owner says

CHESTERVILLE — Corn and soybean producers who go just by elevator prices might be paying more drying charges than they should.

Last year was a good lesson in the importance of asking about drying charges, said Greg Vanden Bosch, who runs Vanden Bosch Elevators at Chesterville. With phenomenally high moisture in corn, drying charges made a big difference. One farmer, who’d brought two truckloads of a particularly saturated field elsewhere, brought one to Vanden Bosch and asked him to run the numbers to dry it down. Turns out, it would have cost $900 less to dry the corn down at Vanden Bosch’s. Granted, that was for corn at 38 per cent moisture, which producers don’t have to contend with this year.

But while most producers know there’s a drying charge for their crop, most don’t know just how much it can vary, he said. An elevator operators’ meeting at Lindsay stunned him with some of the disparities, he said.

Part of the problem is that this didn’t used to be the way of things. About 20 years ago, farm and elevators would hammer out a province-wide price for drying. But the farm organizations complained that it was uncompetitive, he said, and it was dropped. Now individual elevators make their own rates, assembled from a broad constellation of factors: electricity charges, fuel usage and type and what types of equipment they have. A snapshot of independent elevators in Eastern and Central Ontario shows the degree of variation: drying rates for 20 per cent moisture corn can be as high as $22/tonne and as low as $10.29/tonne. Drying down soybeans from 15 per cent moisture could cost as much as $16.50/tonne or as little as $3.49/tonne.

Most elevators have a spreadsheet that breaks down how the final cost is calculated. But not many farmers ask to see it, Vanden Bosch said, and it’s worth asking about. Don’t assume that because the elevator is offering a higher price for the crop you’re coming out ahead, he said.