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Ryan, IA | Here are a few pics of what we managed to find was a costly learning experience.
The first pic is the back side of the commodity shed where you can see the hatch in the roof that we would open up when filling the first bay with corn dry corn from the bins just out of the picture to the right. This worked great to setup the roller mill and let the auger idle along for a few hours to fill, but continuing to setup the auger every three weeks was less than desirable.
The second photo shows the front openings. Notice the first bay is not full of cracked dry corn. We were in the process of filling the bunker and pushed the ground hay inside out of the way this year. This also shows our second major downfall to the design. We get DDG and wet gluten by-products on belt trailers. They can back in along the front of the shed to unload, but can't unload right in the bays. Normally the far bay was DDG and the middle bay was wet. This required us to use the end loader to push it in. Not all efficient. Third picture shows exactly what I'm talking about not being able to unload into the bay and the distance to one of three bins which are in-line w/each other.
I don't have any photos of how it is today - but I can say we took the shed down, cut the walls out and are now using a load quick enough it doesn't need to be inside so the trucks can back in and pile it up without us having to push it in out of the way to the silage or turning around to load the silage truck. I should note the mixer parks just along the bunker wall, just off the edge of the concrete.
Tips we learned, build the walls higher. We were less than four feet above the floor - would go to at least 6 feet. Use screws if using wood. You don't want any nails popping out landing in feed. If you have any occasional wind, use metal banding to strap the roof down to the walls, again with screws. Keep the lights to the shed well beyond the reach of the loader AND load. Any wall that you can, not intend, but CAN push against needs to be thick enough for twice the current loader. We went from an S250 skid steer to a 444J loader and the extra 10,000lbs can do a number to walls!
Hope you enjoy, we're considering putting another shed up, but we just added a second bunker which required some extensive dirt work. To put a shed up will require even more dirt work and right now we're not sure it's worth it with high moisture corn in the uprights, feeding the wet products out with acceptable spoilage, and a bunker of corn silage and another of earlage. Ground hay would be nice to be under roof.
 (Bunker & Commodity Shed.jpg)
 (IMG_0206.jpg)
 (Sept 18 2009 004.jpg)
Attachments
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 Bunker & Commodity Shed.jpg (56KB - 695 downloads)
IMG_0206.jpg (66KB - 702 downloads)
Sept 18 2009 004.jpg (31KB - 625 downloads)
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Commodity shed
