Quick Pics: Cleaning up an oversupply of grain

Spring wheat belonging to CHS Big Sky sits piled Sept. 4 along U.S. Highway 2 east of Havre. This pile was about 250 bushels of grain, Lance Johnson, grain manager for the company, said and approximately 550 bushels more wheat had to be piled on the ground in the elevator's yard after a better than expected spring wheat harvest. Tom Chard, an agricultural statistician with USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service Montana Field Office, said the final numbers aren't in for this year to give a precise picture of harvest in north-central Montana, but the state forecast is for 96.9 million bushels of spring wheat to be harvested this year, almost double the 2017 harvest. As of Thursday, Montana's average wheat harvest is 34 bushels per acre, he added, up from 21 bushels per acre in 2017.

The bulk of the wheat that had to be temporarily stored on the ground by CHS Big Sky in Havre this harvest season sits Wednesday in the elevator's yard. Lance Johnson, grain manager for the company, said he expects the company will have all its grain off the ground by October. Johnson added that he could see where birds and a few deer from Havre's large population had eaten on the grain, and a thin ring of green growth around the base of the pile showed that some grains on the very edge had not escaped the moisture and had sprouted. This loss is minimal and expected, he said.

CHS Big Sky employees use a loader and an auger Wednesday to transfer the spring wheat from the ground to trucks that are hauling the grain to silos for better-protected storage. Lance Johnson, grain manager for the company, said that when the grain is piled in an evenly sloped mound it sheds water well, and the elevator expects an average of 3 percent loss in grain stored outside like this. If the elevator had not taken the grain, even though they were beyond storage capacity, Johnson said, then the farmers would have been forced to pile it on the ground at their own farms or haul to an elevator farther away.