Logistics and Economics of Grain Harvest and Transport Systems with the Use of Silo-Bag

Argentina has many unique grain growing areas, where production is carried out under very marginal growing conditions and it is often the shear scale of farms that makes them profitable. Under this conditions, a plastic, temporary storage of grain called silo-bag was established and largely experimented by INTA. Among the benefit of the system, the availability of storage system in the field allow for a relief in the transportation system that can have its own schedule. In this case the transport is not a constraint for the harvest operation. A discrete event simulation was built upon the data collected during field trials to model the harvest and transport operation with the aim to compare the silo-bag system vs. traditional hauling of grain just harvested to the elevator. The crop investigated in the field trials was soybeans. For the simulation of Simulation parameters included: combine size, operating speed, turning time, unloading time, truck operation and transport speed. Also travel distance of 10 and 40 miles (16 and 64 km) from the elevator and elevator operation where investigated in this paper to compare the traditional hauling with trucks and the silo-bag system. The model was able to optimize the number of road transport trucks to best match the harvester for the two systems, to determine the performance of the two systems and the operating costs. The results from the model shows that the larger the distance from the elevator, the greater are the saving due to the use of silo-bags, especially with non-optimal number of trailers available. Especially during the busy harvest the silo-bag proven to allows the use of large combine capacity without interruptions that can occurs because of delay in transport or elevator operation.