New Elevator Going Up - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

An elevator farmers have been hauling their grain to for more than a century is getting an upgrade.

Ag Reporter Sarah Gustin takes you to New Salem to show you the effort of turning yards of concrete into grain silos.

The scenery is changing in New Salem.

(Gaylen Lennick / New Salem Elevator Manager)"Excited, it's all good. Yep we are excited."

Gaylen Lennick is the Manager at Southwest Grain.

The elevator is building a wheat and corn terminal along the BNSF.

(Gaylen Lennick / New Salem Elevator Manager)"It'll eliminate a lot of the long waiting lines that we were frustrated in doing the last several years. We are excited to make things better." 

The construction project that started in August is moving up.

But after a more than 30 foot climb to the top, we found out the real construction happens inside.

(Gaylen Lennick / New Salem Elevator Manager) "Rises 7/8 of an inch every 5 minutes, roughly so about a foot an hour. And they go 24 hours a day7 days a week until they are complete. There are about 80 people on deck during shift change, it's quite a process."

Lennick says it'll take 10-thousand yards of concrete, that's 1000 truck loads--to make a base and to take these silos to 150 feet.

(Gaylen Lennick / New Salem Elevator Manager) "Demand, competition. You have to be ready to serve the patrons, dump fast get them back to home so they can do their work If you weren't going to do it somebody else will."

(Sarah Gustin / sgustin@kxnet.com) "The new facility will double the size of this older existing facility, it will have 1 million bushels of storage. But this older facility isn't going away anytime soon. Southwest grain will utilize it for specialty crops."

Lennick says the elevator will be ready for deliveries by July.