Grain storage for years not months

But, those who have managed to get a crop off could be looking to store grain on-farm for longer periods than usual, according to GRDC Grain Storage Extension coordinator, Chris Warrwick.

"Traditionally on farm storage was about three to nine months storage for your own use, feed, or selling it through the year," Mr Warrick said.

"We're now seeing more and more often people storing grain for over 12 months, two to three years, because they believe a particular commodity might be under-valued or for drought feeding."

Mr Warwick said this trend could put pressure on how well people manage their storage system and maintain quality over a longer period of time.

"How long you can store grain for is mostly based on your preparation," Mr Warwick said.

"The basics for preparation hasn't changed, insect prevention, hygiene, structural treatment and aeration cooling.

"Fortunately more people are also becoming educated on the need for sealable storage, which is not to keep the insects out but it's actually so you can fumigate if you need to."

Andrew Kotzur of silo manufacturing company, Kotzur, said this season they were seeing more growers interested in moving towards fixed conveying equipment rather than moving augers to improve efficiency at harvest.

"It's about keeping grain away from the headers at harvest if they're storing on farm and also as part of a staging point, to create a buffer for grain that might still be reloaded when the trucks are available to freight to the bulk handler or end user," Mr Kotzur said.

"If they can store the grain closer to where it's harvested they can keep their harvest operation running faster."

Corowa farmer, Beau Longmire said they had fabricated their own drive-over hopper for harvest this year.

The equipment enabling them to use their B-Double trucks or even road-trains to cart grain from the header.

"The standard swing-away augers can make it quite challenging for some of the B-Doubles," he said.

"In the future we would like to move towards road-trains, pending permit, where we can run the two trailers up over the drive hopper rather than having to split them at our home silo."

Mr Longmire said the equipment was essentially a heavy steel structure over an existing swing away that delivered grain into one of their two 1500 tonne silos.

"It enables us to drive the trucks over the hopper without moving the swing away and it means we can unload multiple trailers over a swing away hopper without having to unhook," he said.

Paul Godde of Godde's Grains and Fertilizers, Culcairn said barley could be the crop growers in the Riverina plan on storing short-term this year.

"With the price of barley dropping I'm seeing a lot of people selling their wheat for cash and actually punting on their barley," Mr Godde said.

"Storing their barley to sell later on to try and capture a bit of upside in the market."

He said others planned to sell to neighbours for stock-feed as they needed it.

"We saw a lot of that last year as well, farmers storing their grain and selling it to their neighbour that has sheep and getting quite good margins because there's hardly any freight involved," Mr Godde said.

GRDC Northern Region panel member, Roy Hamilton, Rand agreed southern NSW growers had found marketing direct to nearby end-users was a good strategy in recent years.

"We're in an area that consumes a lot of grain, there's a lot of end-users to participate in that market," Mr Hamilton said.

"Hopefully some end-users will start multi-year arrangements with growers, people are always chasing stability."

However, he said holding grain purely to wait for the price to rise could be fought with danger.

"I think it can be risky because it's not a given that the price will go up," he said.

Coleambally grower, Graham O'Connell recently invested in two 670t silos from Allied Grain Systems. He said he did manage to catch an up-swing in prices.

"I hadn't locked in a contract for corn but come harvest I ended up receiving $80 more a tonne from a client to store it," Mr O'Connell said.

He said he still had corn in his silos, most going to producers feeding out. "The on-farm storage allows us to control our cash-flow and market it ourselves," Mr O'Connell said.