By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

EDON, Ohio — Eli Troyer has a list of questions he likes to ask potential customers: Are you buying more grain than you are selling? Are you losing grain in your bins? Is your grain deteriorating in your bins?
Do you core the center of your bins to get rid of the fines? Are you over-drying your grain to keep the fines from spoiling? Are you shipping uneven loads of broken corn and foreign material?

If the answer to any of those questions is, “Yes,” Troyer follows through with more questions: What is the right temperature for the grain for the time of the year? What is your grain temperature right now? When do you run your aeration fans to correct the grain temperature without changing the moisture of the grain? How long do you run your aeration fans?
“These are simple questions about grain storage that require complex answers,” he said.

And, as far as he is concerned, they can be solved with a two-step process: put the grain in the bin correctly with an AgriDry Grain Spreader; and run the aeration system correctly with a Bullseye Controller.

Troyer speaks with the voice of experience gleaned from 40 years of working in the grain storage industry. He was 18 in 1970 when he joined a crew pouring concrete silos. He started his own retail grain bin sales and service business in 1976 and by 1981, was selling natural air drying bins.

In 1986 he designed the AgriDry controller to monitor and control fans on the air drying bins. He purchased a rotating gravity grain spreader product line from a designer in Iowa in 1990. He sold the spreader and controller product lines to Brock Grain and Feed Systems of Milford, Ind., in 1998.

In 2001, he purchased the Bullseye Controller line from Brock and developed a marketing program to sell controllers on the World Wide Web.

Operating out of a 10,000 square-foot office and warehouse located at the east end of the Ohio turnpike at 03460 U.S. Highway 20 in Edon, Troyer’s primary focus is the Bullseye Controller and the grain spreader.

“There have been a lot of changes in the past 40 years,” he said. “For one thing, bins are much larger than they were when a 30-foot diameter bin was considered huge. It’s not uncommon these days to have bins 48 and 54 feet in diameter.”

He will greet visitors at the Fort Wayne Farm Show next week, but also can be contacted by e-mail at either sales@agridryllc.com or support@ agridryllc.com
AgriDry’s telephone number is 419-459-4399.