Floor store, silos or bins: which grain store suits your farm

The three shapes

Flat floor store

A clear-span building with retaining walls, usually with in-floor or laid-on ducts for aeration. Cheapest per tonne at volume, easiest to load quickly with a telehandler, most flexible on what you put in it, and the hardest to segregate small parcels cleanly. Grain depth is limited by the wall design, and AHDB notes duct spacing has to tighten as depth increases.

Steel silos

Round bins on a slab, usually with sweep or full aeration floors. Excellent segregation, one crop or one contract per silo, good control of aeration, and straightforward discharge. Higher cost per tonne at small scale, needs conveying and elevating to fill, and needs the groundworks that come with it.

Ventilated bins or small bulk bins

Smaller units, often used for drying batches or for keeping seed and small parcels apart. Good where you need many separate lots or a near-ambient drying stage, less good as a primary bulk store.

Choosing on the four things that actually decide it

• Segregation. Count the number of separate parcels you genuinely need at once, malting versus feed, seed, different varieties, different contracts. That count pushes you towards silos or bins faster than tonnage does.
• Intake rate. A floor store swallows trailers as fast as a telehandler can push grain up. A silo system is limited by the conveying kit you bought. Match the intake rate to the combine, not to the average day.
• Drying strategy. Near-ambient drying wants depth control and airflow, which is a design constraint on a floor store and a specification on a bin.
• Discharge and haulage. How grain gets out, cleanly and quickly, when the lorry is booked. This is the part farms most often underinvest in and most often regret.

Can you adapt the building you already have?

Sometimes the cheapest tonne on the farm is in an existing shed, and sometimes that shed is a very expensive mistake. The test is structural, not visual. Bulk grain pushes sideways on walls with real force, and a frame designed for machinery or straw was not designed for that. Get an engineer's opinion on the frame and on wall panels before you get excited about the saving.

1. Structural check first. Can the frame and the walls take lateral grain pressure at the depth you want?
2. Floor condition and level. Is the slab sound, and can ducts be laid or cut in without compromising it?
3. Weather tightness. Roof and gutters, because AHDB's store checklist starts with water ingress.
4. Proofing. Can the building realistically be proofed against rodent and bird entry, or is it open eaves for the next thirty years?
5. Access and turning. Lorry access, apron and turning space, which is what makes a store work in October.
6. Then compare the adapted cost per tonne against a purpose-built store quoted at the same tonnage. Sometimes the conversion wins by a mile; sometimes it is 80% of the price for 50% of the store.

Whole-farm questions worth asking before you spend

• Is the storage for marketing flexibility or for logistics? Storing to sell later is a different business case from storing to get the combine moving.
• What does off-farm storage actually cost you, including haulage both ways, intake charges and the price you accept for wet grain at harvest? That is the number your new store competes with.
• What is the store worth if cropping changes? A flat store is useful for almost anything. A dedicated system is worth less if you stop growing the crop it was built for.
• Grants and capital allowances. Both change, both are worth asking your accountant and your local scheme about before you commit, and neither should be assumed from a supplier's sales sheet.

Costs per tonne vary far too widely by site, groundworks and specification for a published figure to help. Get quotes at your actual tonnage, for both a purpose-built store and an adaptation, and compare them on the same segregation and intake rate.