Page 8 - Logan County Farm Outlook - Spring 2013

2013 LOGAN COUNTY FARM OUTLOOK MAGAZINE. LINCOLN DAILY NEWS.com March 21, 2013
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have in a good year, and coupling that
with the aflatoxin problem, elevators in
central Illinois really got hurt.
Elevators make their money on
services like grain storage, transport,
drying and sales. In 2012 producers
were urged to bring all their corn to town
right away and not put anything in on-
farm storage, so producers
brought everything to the
elevator as it came in from
the fields. Elevators such
as Hartsburg Grain dried
the corn down to moisture
levels far below usual in
order to stabilize the corn
and prevent aflatoxin from
growing in the elevator
bins. So, energy costs
were higher for the elevator
to prevent the corn in storage from all
becoming further corrupted with the
aflatoxin fungus.
Corn put in on-farm storage generally
doesn’t go through any drying procedure
except having air circulated in the bin,
giving the aflatoxin mold an opportunity
to permeate the entire on-farm stored
crop, meaning total loss.
Along with higher energy costs, the
elevator was plagued with cash-flow
problems associated with very low yield.
The elevator had much less product to
transport, dry and store, and suffered
because the income-producing services
were underused. Bauer said it is hard
enough trying to stay alive when we
have a low-yield year, and then there
was the aflatoxin problem
to deal with also.
The old-timer name
for aflatoxin is “shiners,”
because if there is enough
aflatoxin present in the test
sample, the corn samplewill
glow under black light. The
FDA has limited the amount
of aflatoxin that elevators
can accept to 20 parts per
billion. Bauer said many loads that came
in and tested with 20 ppb aflatoxin didn’t
glow at all under the black-light test, so
they threw the black lights away and
relied only on modern testing methods.
“We developed standardized routines
for testing the corn samples and believe
we came up with the best ways to fairly
protect the public and the producer,”