CANTON, MO. -- The Ursa Farmer's Cooperative has opened a $13-million dollar facility in Canton Missouri that is designed to help area farmer's get their grain to market faster and in turn help them improve their profits.
The elevator comes about after many years of planning and construction that began last spring.
On Friday, members of the Ursa Farmer's Cooperative showed off their seventh and newest elevator. This is the first facility the coop has opened in Missouri.
Roger Hugenberg is the manager of the Canton elevator and he said this will be a major addition not just to the area but to the members of the coop who live on the west side of the Mississippi River.
"Our Missouri membership today has been taking the Canton ferry boat across the river, it's been very vital, instrumental and beneficial, but yet it has its limitations just by size and distance. So this will benefit our membership by giving them a quicker market as far as the ability to dump loads quicker and the ability top store and it's investment by Ursa in Missouri," Hugenberg said.
State of the art technology is part of the process of when trucks full of grain roll in to dump their loads. It begins at the scales where digital read out cards are on the trucks and a scanner reads them telling the operators who the trucks belong too. From there it's decided if the grain will head to storage or if it will be immediately loaded onto a barge. Once the grain is off loaded, the truck comes back to the scales and is weighed and the account is settled. It will only take three and a half minutes to unload a semi full of grain.
Dan McCutchann farms just north of Canton. He said with the new facility located on the west side of the river, it will cut down on time spent driving back and forth from the elevator in Meyer Illinois.
"It's going to tremendously increase the speed from field back to field. We will not have the time You will not have the time it takes to wait at the elevator, wait at the ferry It's just going to increase speed," McCutchann said.
Right now the Canton elevator has a storage capacity of about half a million bushels of grain. Work is scheduled for next year in Canton to increase the storage and to be able to provide more service and accommodations to their members for the years to come.
The co-op also said the Canton ferry will continue to operate between Canton and Meyer.
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