Wednesday afternoon I was hauling beans to the elevator and they had a crew there picking up their corn pile. There was a lot of corn piled outside this fall in Minnesota because we had a very good crop. It is not unusual to see a pile of corn by an elevator for a short time in the fall. If corn is on the ground in a bunker with a tarp on top it probably would be fine until spring. Piles of corn on the ground like in the picture with no tarp is a different situation. Elevators want to get them in a bin as soon as possible.

How well corn stores outside depends on the weather. When you store corn outside you want cold and dry. Not exactly the weather we have had this past month. As I drove into the elevator I could smell the corn. The manager said the corn was 14-15 percent moisture when it was put in the pile and now after all the rain it was 18 percent. They were running it through their dryer and planning on shipping it out as soon as possible. He said some of it had 50 percent damage and some had no damage. What they will do is blend it with good corn so there will be no price discount. However, there will be some loss because anytime corn starts to heat you are using some of the dry matter in the kernel.

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