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First rain, then fire.
Most farmers are quite aware of the great difficulties with heavy rain encountered all through this spring in many parts of the US. We saw multiple photos of water covering vast areas of land. These same floods destroyed very significant quantities of grain in store as high water levels penetrated stores and bins.
When water penetrates a steel bin, the grain inside will eventually grow and the hydraulic pressure created by germinating seeds will generally burst the bolts or rivets to collapse the bin and drop the grain out into the water to be lost.
Huge piles
In high-yield years it is common also to have significant quantities of grains stored outside in purpose-built temporary storage. These can be huge piles with up 15,000t. In general, when water gets into stored grain it is no longer usable for feed due to the risk of micro-toxin build-up – but what else can happen?
Well, scenes like the one in the poor-quality photo above, which shows a 3m bushel pile of soya beans (over 81,000t) glowing in the distance. This particular pile sat in 2 metres of water in March and the flood subsided in April but the beans did not dry out. The pile began to create its own heat and started to visibly smoke about a week ago. Now it is a full-blooded fire and there may be many more about.
The total losses of stock arising from the spring floods are likely to remain uncertain for some time yet.
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