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Prairie Farmer - August 2006

End Grain Inventory Nightmare

Travis Farley
Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

It's not uncommon for farms to have grain stored in several different locations: at grain elevators, in home-farm storage spaces, in bins on other farms and more. Plus, some operators manage and store grain for their landowners.

Documenting the location and ownership of all these bushels from harvest to sale can be an overwhelming task and a paperwork nightmare. It becomes even tougher when you're tracking grain across multiple storage locations for multiple grain owners.

You can avoid the nightmare, even with harvest just around the corner. The folks at University of Illinois' farmdoc have developed a specific FAST Tool that can help you keep track of this fall's production and help you manage grain inventories from the field to storage to sales.

The Grain Inventory Management program allows you to manage and track grain inventories by grain owner, storage site and field. The reports generated by the spreadsheet include production reports by field and grain inventory reports by owner of the grain and by storage location.

You can record a variety of grain transactions, such as production, sales, purchases, feed to livestock, transfers, loan deficiency payments and forward contracts. The program reports these grain activities in easy-to-read documents. They're especially useful to hand to landlords to communicate harvest results and the current storage location of all bushels.

The Summary of Grain Transactions by Grain Owner table represents part of a grain owner report you can generate with the spreadsheet. The far left column lists the different storage locations, while the remaining columns of the table summarize some of the bushel activity for each grain transaction.

The example report is for John and Sally Smith. The Atlanta Grain storage location row shows that 23,985 bushels of corn were harvested and stored at Atlanta Grain. The Smiths have transferred 18,340 bushels to this storage site and have sold 36,235 bushels, collecting a loan deficiency payment on 7,210 bushels, from this location. Their current inventory is 6,090 bushels of corn. By inputting information about grain owners, storage locations, fields, acres and crops grown, the Grain Inventory Management tool creates a database listing the grain transactions entered. You can then search this stored information to answer a variety of questions, such as “What date did I harvest the field behind the house?” or “When did I collect an LDP and what was the price?”

Visit www.farmdoc.uiuc.edu/fasttools/ to download the Grain Inventory Management tool. Also available is a user guide giving you step-by-step instructions for entering information into the program and explaining how to interpret grain inventory reports.