Work to start soon on CGB grain facility

MANDEVILLE, La. — Within two weeks, one lucky bidder will win the contract to construct a new railroad grain loading facility at Dwight.

“We’re in the final stages of contractor selection,” Greg Beck of CGB Enterprises noted Wednesday of the facility going in on the company’s 154-acre site four miles east of Dwight on Illinois 17.

Vice president of grain operations at CGB, Beck commented on the number of contractors interested in the project, saying not many people build shuttle loaders or are familiar with how it’s done.

Regardless, CGB started its search for a contractor with 15 bid offers, and has narrowed the number down to five at this time. Most of the bidders are from Illinois.

Construction is slated to get under way within the next 60 days. Beck did not have a price tag on the project, nor could he estimate the number of construction jobs it will create.

The project is to be operational by the time of the 2011 corn and soybean harvest.

A state-of-the-art facility employing much new technology and new building methods, the project consists of a grain terminal with shuttle loading capability on the Norfolk and Southern Railroad.

The shuttle will have the capability to continuously load 110 railroad grain cars via the loop track. A somewhat similar facility with loop track was constructed at the Grainco FS Elevator in Ransom about five years ago.

The facility will have a storage capability of about 2.2 million bushels of grain. At this time, CGB is focusing on a grain receiving capacity of 60,000 bushels hourly.

“We understand farmers do not want to wait in line to unload grain during harvest season,” Beck said. “We will build a facility with a very short wait time. Our goal is a wait time of under an hour.”

The facility will accept corn and soybeans, and if the need is there, wheat as well.

Illinois is not a big wheat-growing state, which means that some years, the CGB facility might handle no wheat whatsoever.

“But if farmers grow more wheat, we will jump into that market,” Beck said.

CGB, which has 64 other grain handling locations throughout the nation, was looking for a site to add a new railroad loading facility, and chose the Dwight location.

“One thing we noticed was as the United States uses more and more corn for ethanol, the poultry and swine feeders in the southeast need a larger drawing area from which to buy corn,” he said.

These feeders typically buy corn from Ohio and Indiana. However, because a lot of this is now being used for ethanol, the feeders have come further west for their corn purchases.

“Illinois is a fabulous corn producing state,” Beck noted. “We decided we needed a railroad loader in Illinois to ship corn to the east and southeast, and we kept coming back to Dwight for a location.”

Beck said the search team kept returning to Dwight because of the availability of corn supplies, and its capability to move 110 railroad cars of grain.

“Not a whole lot of shippers can ship 110 rail cars,” he said.

The grain movement will probably be on a year-around schedule, depending on the demand for corn in the Southeast. The facility anticipates being very busy during the harvest season in October and November.

“We anticipate loading every month of the year,” he said. “On average, more than once a month.”