SFG Operations Update

Charles Smith Agronomy Operations Manager

Looks like we survived another winter, and spring is upon us. Things will start to green up before we know it. Equipment-wise, we are ready to go to the field as soon as the weather cooperates. Over the winter we completed several projects to make things better for this spring. We still have some more projects coming down the pipe to discuss.

One project was to remodel the Milo office building. This building needed several upgrades. We put in new windows, rebuilt the stairway entrance, enlarged the bathroom, put on new siding, and added two offices. We still have some work to do on the building, but we are getting close to completion. In addition to those improvements, we have made several other improvements around the facility. The grain elevator upgrade functioned very well this past fall and winter. We poured a concrete floor in the storage shed east of the office, allowing us to store more feed and seed on site. We should now have plenty of room for the greatly increased feed and seed business at this location.

The Pleasantville location will be next on the list. The windows are a little drafty and the current siding is three different styles. Work will be done on new windows for the lower offices and new, uniform siding for the office building. This should really spruce the building up. We are also going to install new flooring inside the office building. This project will start next month.

Also, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be building a new office building and warehouse at our Centerville location. This will consolidate all our storage under one roof and greatly increase our storage capacity for feed, seed, and chemicals. We hope to get it done this year and to have the grain grading area done by harvest. It will be a huge improvement over the current workspace there. Weather has kept us from getting much application done over the past couple of months, but we are ready to go. All the NH3 toolbars and wagons are ready to go. We have several acres lined up for custom NH3 and several for customers to apply with our rental bars. In a perfect world it would be nice if all the ground dried up at once, but we know that’s not going to happen. We have a limited number of toolbars available, let us know as soon as you think your ground is ready so we can get you taken care of.

Finally, we’re busy making sure that fertilizer application equipment is ready for spring. The Super Grow and dry machines are ready to go. The pre-chemical sprayers will come out of the shed after the first of April. We got them ready to go last fall, so we should not have a lot to do on them. We now just need the ground conditions to dry up and temperatures to rise. I’m ready for it to warm up, and I know you are too.