Grain facilities report good crops, improving prices

Area farmers are wrapping up a 2025 harvest that grain merchandisers report showed some good yields and quality and recently has been attracting better pricing.

The season brought an occasional untimely rain or temporary grain movement backlog, but farmers weathered those issues and are now watching markets for selling opportunities.

Overall, it was an above average harvest, said Brandon Burbidge, general manager at Border Ag and Energy of Bottineau, which has multiple grain-handling locations in northcentral North Dakota,

“Spring wheat was right at average harvest. Beans were probably slightly above average harvest. Canola is above average harvest, and corn was probably above average harvest in the area. Quality has been pretty decent across all the commodities. A little bit of the late wheat had some quality issues, but it’s one of those things that should be pretty manageable,” Burbidge said. “Corn has been pretty good quality overall.”

Farmers were storing their crops early on, but with recent price increases, they have been taking advantage, he added.

Border Ag and Energy doesn’t have grain stored on the ground, but its structural storage has been at capacity a couple of times, Burbidge said. Typically, backlogs occurred as strong harvests came in and farmers needed storage, but space would reopen in a day or two once a train came through to take grain out, he said.

“Most years we’re storing a lot of grain – big harvests up in this area typically,” he added.

Kayla Burkhart, general manager at Dakota Midland Grain, said the wheat crop was about average, and due to prices, much of it went into bin storage. Dakota Midland has facilities in Voltaire, Surrey/Norwich and at Guthrie, north of Drake.

“We had high expectations for yield,” she said of the soybean crop, “and they still yielded well at around 45 (bushels an acre) or so, but we were expecting more.”

Burkhart said moisture was the challenge for corn growers this year, and it kept dryers busy.

“But other than that, quality was great and yields were good. I was hearing a lot of yield reports in the 160s (bushels per acre) and some a few higher. Of course, there were some lower as well in other areas, but 150 to 160 seemed to be pretty consistent,” she said of the corn crop.

“We moved a lot of corn at harvest. So, now that we’re coming off the tails of that, I think we’re going to start to see some wheat and soybeans move,” Burkhart said. “We’re starting to see some beans start to trickle in. I think if the weather stays good, we’ll have a pretty busy December as well.”

David Holzwarth, general manager at Rugby Farmers Elevator, said earlier this month that a lot of crop went into on-farm storage, but the Rugby elevator also was briefly full just prior to a couple of BNSF trains taking loads in mid-November.

Farmers appear to be hanging on to their wheat after harvesting average or below average yields due to a dry spring, he said. The wheat quality generally has been good, but prices haven’t encouraged farmers to sell, he said.

Some commodities have moved when prices were favorable, though.

“We handled a record amount of canola this year,” Holzwarth said, noting the canola was above average this year..

Jeremy Burkhart, CEO at United Quality Cooperative, based in New Town, said wheat and durum yields were higher and quality was good early in the harvest. Later rains negatively impacted some of the later crop, he said. Soybean yields also were average, with frost damaging some of the crop in the Parshall and Ross areas, he added.

“Flax and canola were pretty good. It sounds like corn is phenomenal,” he said.

Late last week, United Quality’s facilities were quite full and waiting for the next train to come through.

“But for the most part, we were pretty fluid with room throughout harvest,” Burkhart said, attributing the recent influx in commodities to improving prices and price futures.

However, Burkhart said there’s still plenty of grain stored on the farms.

“If we get some decent rallies and they can hit some price points, I think they’d sell,” he said.