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Oct 05, 2018

B5 Contracting and Propane

By Chad Larson - Energy Sales Manager

Harvest is underway.  We know from the spring we had, this was going to be a trying year.  Know that your energy sales staff always does their best to keep you informed of buying opportunities to save you money where we can.  Whether that be forward contracting or just regular contact when cash buying so you can make an informed decision at that time.

This brings me to post-harvest.  My sales staff and I are going to be out talking to our customers about B5 contracting.  As we have explained throughout this year, there is a loophole in the bio-mandate to where if you contract B5 and put money down BEFORE April 1st, you can run B5 all season. This will help manage the September/October guessing game of taking small deliveries to start beans and then holding off until October 1st, so you can then fill will all B5. The size of your storage tank(s) and when you start harvesting corn, to ambient air temps in October and November all play a part in how to manage ANY soy in your diesel fuel. 

As a Cooperative that deals with agricultural growers, we support soy. However, we must be diligent in explaining what we’ve seen in the past once the weather turns cool. With today’s equipment having 2-5-micron filters, the higher concentrations of soy take extreme management in cooler temps if we aren’t proactive with the timing of deliveries and if there are issues, getting you PowerService (anti-gel) or #1 to get you flowing again. 

PROPANE

With corn moisture reports coming in already end of September of moisture 17-20%, we know we won’t be using a lot of LP company-wide.  Some brittle stalk issues have forced some farmers to take their corn out earlier than they’d like, but again, it won’t be near the demand we saw last year. This means there won’t be any supply concerns, hopefully, and the delivery drivers should keep up with the needs at these moisture ranges.

Our highly trained staff is always here for you.  If you have any concerns or questions about anything, please call. You can call me directly at 507-317-4488 or any one of my salespersons, and we will do whatever we can to assist you.

Have a safe harvest!

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