Wheat harvest this year in Sumner County, the world's largest wheat producing county, has a new feature — a new terminal elevator.

The behemoth Producer Ag LLC facility, built in a remote area near Milan, is a joint project of Mid-Kansas Cooperative and CHS. It offers 7.5 million bushels of storage and rapid turnaround unloading speeds.

It began taking in its first loads of wheat the last week of May, but those trucks were bringing wheat from other TMA local elevators and were designed to test the system and make sure everything was ready for the real deal — which in Sumner County was the first week of June.

The first new crop to come in was canola, which has seen growth as a rotation crop with wheat in the region. Harvest of canola this year began a few days ahead of wheat harvest.  

The Producer Ag facility has concrete grain silos plus a 200-by-800-foot flat storage building divided into three sections to allow for storing multiple commodities. The facility has four 25,000-bushel legs capable of unloading 80,000 to 100,000 bushels of grain every hour. On the flip side, it can load out rail cars at a comparable pace.

The terminal is the second built by the Producer Ag partnership. The first opened at Canton in 2015. It is somewhat unusual in that it added new slip-form concrete silos like the old "prairie skyscrapers" built in the 1950s.

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"There has been a lot of construction of jump-form concrete bins, steel buildings and ground bunkers," said Jeff Jones, director of southern operations for MKC. "But building new slip-form concrete is relatively rare in Kansas. We believe, however, that it is important to build infrastructure for the future. Our goal is not just to be able to serve customers today, but to be prepared to meet the needs of 20 or 50 years from now."

Read more about the new Sumner County Producer Ag terminal.