Up and running: A look inside the first harvest at Mill Junction (with photo slideshow)

In the time it takes a person to order fast food from a drive thru window and pick it up, a farmer can now empty an entire truckload of grain at Mid-Iowa Cooperative’s brand new, $15 million Mill Junction facility north of Grundy Center.
           
The four full-time employees at the elevator— site manager Steve Duit, Neal Hurlbutt, Josie McMartin and office manager Nanci Henningsen—have been hard at work over the last month, and a construction crew from Mid-States Millwright still has cranes on the premises while finishing up a flat ground storage area behind the five primary bins. All told, the total capacity at Mill Junction is projected at around 5,000,000 bushels, and it’s already taken in at least a million since September.
           
“We’ve got speed that nobody else has,” Duit said.
           
Currently, the company is working with around 50 producers from as far north as Clarksville and as far south as Beaman and Conrad, and according to CEO Mike Kinley, about 70 percent of them are first time Mid-Iowa customers. One of them, Kyle Dudden of the Reinbeck area, had two trucks in and out within 10 minutes on Monday morning.
           
“One of the blessings of 30-plus years in the business is (that) your gut instincts actually start to pay dividends,” Kinley said. “Having a facility that was out in the country, that was very fast in receiving grain—could receive 55,000 bushels an hour here—(and has) a large dryer capacity, which is going to pay big dividends for our members this fall because the crop’s wet… It all means that the producer can get the crop out of the field quicker and isn’t waiting in line.” 
 
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