Jill Schramm/MDN CHS-SunPrairie general manager Brad Haugeberg comments on a photo held by operations manager Larry Aberle, showing the cooperative’s first 52-car train of spring wheat to the Pacific Northwest, loaded in Minot in December 1980 after passage of the Staggers Act deregulated railroads. At left is multi-commodity and project manager Jeremy Burkhart and at right, Jeff Heil, seed division manager with Dakota Agronomy Partners.

Bigger, fewer and faster is how CHS SunPrairie manager Brad Haugeberg describes the changes occurring in agriculture.

CHS SunPrairie has seen consolidation in the grain industry, and now with a network that extends from Bottineau to Garrison, the emphasis is on stepping up the pace to move at the speed of agriculture today.

“One of the things that has changed a lot about farming is the velocity and how we do business with our growers. They go faster. We have to go faster,” Haugeberg said.

He recalls the days when farmers would stand and chat with the elevator staff while leisurely waiting for grain to unload off the single-axle farm truck.

“Nobody was in an hurry,” Haugeberg said, contrasting with today’s semi-trucks that unload in minutes and are on their way.

“Today, they want to be in and out about as fast as they can,” he said. “We have to find ways to deliver and receive at a faster pace. We are loading 100- to 110-car trains in a matter of hours. Everybody is about velocity.”

At the same time as farmers are needing their grain terminals to offer efficiency and speed, CHS SunPrairie is seeing some of its aging facilities reach the point where they can no longer keep up. In recent years, an upgrade to the Bowbells plant and new storage at the Minot facility have boosted the cooperative’s infrastructure.

CHS SunPrairie currently is building a new grain facility about two miles from Lansford that is expected to open in the spring of 2018. Most of the track is in and concrete work will be done this spring, said Jeremy Burkhart, multi-commodity and project manager at CHS SunPrairie. The site will have a 120-car loop track and provide 900,000 bushels of storage.

“It fills a void in our trade area,” Burkhart said. “Those farmers up there have to haul almost 30-40 miles one way. This fills in a gap or a hole for them for market access.”

Haugeberg said the Lansford facility will take wheat, beans and corn, which are grown on 70 percent of the acres in that area. The Mohall facility no longer would be used for those commodities but will continue to take other crops.

Geography is a consideration in rationalizing where to spend resources, Haugeberg said. In many cases, towns have grown around grain elevators, and the trend is to build new facilities away from town so traffic, noise and air quality don’t become concerns, he said.

Along with building facilities suited to modern agriculture, grain elevators must comply with regulatory rules from various federal agencies and keep up with the latest technology. Joystick controls on car-loading equipment and scanners that read bar codes on rail cars and feed information to equipment are among the technological advances.

Burkhart said not only is grain handling faster but so is market knowledge. Transactions that used to go through a grain broker now are made instantly over the internet. By the time elevator merchandizers would pick up the phone and get their transactions on the trading floor, the price could change 10 cents, he said. Now merchandizers can sit at their desks and see markets trading instantly on a computer screen.

It also is a different era from the days when towns used to have several elevators, farm numbers were plentiful and grain was harvested with threshing machines.

Looking back at early minutes of the cooperative, the big issue at the annual pre-planting planning meeting was how much twine to order to accommodate the crop that would need to be shocked, Haugeberg said. Now spring planning meetings focus on how many railcars to order for the different crops.

CHS SunPrairie traces its roots to Minot Farmers Cooperative Elevator, founded in August 1915. It became Farmers Union Elevator of Minot in 1952. In 1997, the Farmers Union Elevator of Minot merged with Harvest States Cooperatives and formed a new regional division called SunPrairie Grain, now CHS SunPrairie. Harvest States Cooperatives and Cenex merged in 1998 to form Cenex Harvest States Cooperatives, now known as CHS.

In the mid- to late fifties, smaller elevators began seeing financial strain. In 1956, the Wolseth elevator merged with Farmers Union Elevator of Minot. It was the first of several mergers and later acquisitions that continued into the 1990s.

Throughout the years there have been 29 elevator locations under the cooperative’s name. Today, with fewer producers in the field, there are 10 elevator locations in eight towns, a feed facility, an agronomy center and a sunflower bagging facility that together employ about 150 people.

Consolidations don’t mean there’s not competition in the industry, though. The need to continually become better hasn’t diminished despite the streamlined, tech-savvy, faster operation that already exists.

“We are going to have to keep making improvements on those facilities,” Haugeberg said. “I don’t see the pace slowing down. We are just going to have to continue to do upgrades.”