You can feel the semis hauling grain before you see them in Guide Rock, Nebraska. Their vibrations roll through town before fading into the hum of Ely’s grain elevator at the end of Main Street.
More than 100 deliveries will come through the town of 200 from nearby fields on a peak harvest day. That’s a lot of corn and soybean business for an otherwise quiet town near the Kansas border.
“It’s us, the bank and the post office,” said John Ely, the elevator’s fourth-generation owner, as he opened the door to the elevator office.
Inside, four elevator employees chatted around a table, waiting for the next truck to arrive. When it does, the grain will be tested for moisture, weighed and stored until there’s a buyer – the same way harvest time has worked at the elevator for more than 125 years.
“This is a special place, and there’s good people here,” Ely said, looking around the office.
While the number of elevators nationwide has dropped by more than 2,000 in the past 25 years, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture grain stocks reports, Ely's has stood since 1896. It’s helped sustain the local farming community for generations and grown its operation, even as Guide Rock has lost residents and businesses.
Now, in a year of market uncertainty and grain surplus, the elevator is growing again.
This year’s supply is predicted to surpass traditional upright grain storage capacity in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, according to a CoBank analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Ely’s, along with other elevators in the region, is setting up temporary storage to make up for the shortage. And, low crop prices are expected to delay sales, prolonging storage needs.
The USDA is projecting a record-breaking corn harvest and a higher-than-expected soybean yield per acre. Ely said favorable weather conditions in the Midwest and increased corn acres have pushed production even higher.
“I’m hearing from some of my growers that they’re going through their irrigated into their dryland and they can’t tell the difference. I actually talked to a grower the other day; he said he never turned a pivot on, and he’s getting irrigated yields out of it.”
Ely built a temporary storage bunker to hold another 390,000 bushels of corn this year. Six-foot steel panels now form a wide ring at the edge of their property, about the size of a football field. By mid-October, it already had 200,000 bushels of overflow crop.
“When I ordered these, they said there’s a lot of these going up throughout the country,” he said.
Robin Reid, an extension associate in the Kansas State University Department of Agricultural Economics, said every available space is being used right now to store crops, especially as low crop prices and export uncertainty from tariffs prolong the need for storage.
“It’s just not moving as it was,” Reid said. “Ultimately, everything is tied to the global market.”
Reid said China not buying from the U.S. is a significant impact on the U.S. industry.
A Sept. 25 story by Harvest Public Media showed that U.S. farmers have limited options of where to sell their soybeans this year because China, which usually purchases half the U.S. soybean supply, has not purchased a single order due to the ongoing trade war with the Trump administration.
Most of the grain will be sold to local ethanol plants and feed lots in northern Kansas, protecting Ely and his customers from some of the global market instability.
Ely’s Inc. branched out into fertilizer and chemicals in the 1950s, and eventually started selling seed. In 2024, it bought land and bins from the co-op next door, doubling its grain storage capacity. Now, the elevator has a capacity of over 1 million bushels across 15 bins, two flat storage buildings and the new temporary bunker. So even though the grains are fetching lower prices, the quantity of crops can help farmers who work with Ely meet their bottom line.
Local farmers like Bill Zimmerman are grateful for the elevator’s survival and adaptation.
“There’s very few family-owned elevators, and it’s good to do business with them. They help us, and we’ll help them,” said Zimmerman, who has sold to Ely’s for over 50 years.
It’s more than 35 miles each way to deliver grain to the ethanol plant, one of the main buyers in the area, Zimmerman said. With the elevator, Zimmerman only has to haul his loads 4 miles.
“Elevators really are vital to the community,” said Anastasia Meyer, an extension educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Meyer said they’re more than an economic benefit. They also keep people connected to one another at a time when many older, rural Americans feel isolated.
Ely said that it’s customers, like Zimmerman, who keep the business afloat, and that he hopes that continues down the line when his son takes over.
“Us being here is helping them, and I get a little gratitude out of it knowing that, like, we’re helping them be better at what they are,” Ely said.
“That’s what I get out of it and what I hope my son does, too.”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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METHODS
To report this story, Naomi Delkamiller traveled to Ely’s grain elevator in Guide Rock, Nebraska, and visited the Zimmermans’ fields to understand their production. She interviewed elevator employees, farmers, a co-op vice president and agricultural economists to learn about the current state of grain storage and how harvest is going this year. She also spoke to CoBank researchers to understand their analysis and reviewed U.S. Department of Agriculture grain stocks reports spanning 25 years.
REFERENCES
A banner year for Nebraska crop farmers could be washed by tariff turmoil (Nebraska Public Media | Sept. 23, 2025)
Grain Logistics Outlook: Record Crop Meets Trade Uncertainty (CoBank | Oct. 6, 2025)
CPI to Expand Grain Bunker Storage at Multiple Locations (CPI | July 28, 2025)
USDA Forecasts U.S. Corn Production Up and Soybean Production Down from 2024 (USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service | Aug. 12, 2025)
The Grain Storage Predicament: One-Two Punch of Trade Uncertainty and Big Yields (AgWeb | Oct. 7, 2025)
China won't buy American soybeans anymore, leaving farmers with limited options (Harvest Public Media | Sept. 25, 2025)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
