Basic Grain Training Info

Grain Training

Types of Tickets

INBOUND

Scale Ticket
1. Customer always
Commodity Transfer
1. Company always

OUTBOUND

Shipment
1. Company mainly
2. Customer sometimes
Commodity Transfer
1. Company always

Grain is measured in bushels. A bushel is a unit of weight.

Corn= 56 lbs in a bushel

Soybeans= 60 lbs in a bushel

Inbound Scale Ticket- A ticket where a customer brings in grain to sell

Company Transfer- A ticket that Five Star hauls from one location to another. It may be helpful if the location doesn’t have a dryer or it gets the grain closer to where it will be hauled

Can be inbound or outbound, depends where the driver starts

Outbound Shipment Scale Ticket- Five Star hauls out their own grain out of our locations to a terminal location for us to sell and receive a check on

Terminal- Another company that receives grain that is an end user of our grain, final destination location, Five Star only takes their grain to terminals, Examples: Homeland, Valero, Bunge, Cargill, Flint Hills

Process of scale ticket

Scale ticket numbers are automatic

Each scale ticket is weighed upon entry and after unloading.

Customer grain will come in with the load on, or “heavy”. At this time, the truck pulls on the scale and takes a Gross weight.

The customer will dump the grain and come back “empty”. At this time, we take a Tare weight.

This then determines their Net weight, which is what they get paid on.

Semis that haul grain are around 1,000 bushels. A heavy semi may weigh somewhere around 80,000 lbs. An empty semi can weigh from 25,000-29,000, depending on the style of the truck.

Each inbound scale ticket needs an assembly number.

Assembly Number- A number that identifies a lot of grain for a customer. The assembly number is associated with a customer name, commodity, and location. The same assembly number can be used for multiple tickets for the same customer.

Assembly numbers can be split between customers on a percentage.

Each outbound ticket needs a customer/terminal assigned to it as well as a sales contract.

Sales Contract- A contract that Five Star has with a terminal to determine a bushel amount, price, and delivery period

Grain can get quality discounts. There are four main grade factors that are assigned to corn and beans.

Test Weight (TW)- How dense the grain is

Moisture (M)- How much water makes up the sample of grain

Foreign Material (FM)- Matter that passes through a sieve, could be broken kernels of corn, weed seed, plant material, etc

Damage- Visible discoloration that lessens the quality of grain, could be due to insects, frost, rotting

Each scale ticket needs each four of these grades. Each load of grain that comes across a scale is probed to take a sample. The sample is ran through a tester to determine moisture and test weight and ran through a sieve to determine FM. Damage discount can be visually determined and manually determined if damage is present. There are other grades that can be given as they are present in the grain: weevils, sour, musty, COFO.

Five Star using moisture averaging. This gives a benefit to the customer.

Corn is averaged in two assemblies. Moisture that is 15.5% and below is averaged together, 15.6% moisture and above in another

Beans are averaged in two assemblies Moisture that is 14.0% and below is averaged together, and moisture 14.1% and above in another.

What this means is a customer could bring in multiple loads of corn that could contain each of the following moistures: 15.7, 16.3, 16.5, 16, 17, 15.8. Together, they average 16.22%. This is better for the customer because he could get less of a moisture discount than if each of the loads stood alone.

If a customer is hauling wet and dry grain, the scale operator manually chooses the assembly to put the scale ticket on.

Freight Vendors- Five Star haulers or third party vendors that are hired by Five Star to move our grain

Freight vendors should be on scale tickets or shipments when applicable. Then the charges will also need to be added. This is important later for billing those haulers

Bill of Lading (BOL)- form that Five Star utilizes to define what is on one load that is being hauled, typically a BOL is used in place of a customer name because of limitations on terminal comments

Exporting Scale Tickets- At the end of the day, scale tickets are exported so that they are visible to the rest of the company. During the export, the scale tickets are reviewed again for any errors.

Before they are exported, scale tickets aren’t settleable.