HAYS, KANSAS, US — Midland Marketing Cooperative, which serves nearly 1,000 member-owners and more than 4,100 customers through its 11 grain elevators in the state of Kansas, is expanding its Toulon, Kansas, US, grain elevator by nearly 1 million bushels, according to an article in The Hays Daily News.

Wes Martin, central area manager for Midland, told The Hays Daily News that the expansion project will double the site’s current capacity of 860,000 bushels. Once the expansion is completed later this summer, Toulon will handle the second most grain capacity among Midland’s 11 grain elevators, trailing only the cooperative’s Plainville, Kansas, US, location.

“Yields are increasing every year,” Martin told The Hays Daily News. “There are a lot more fall crops going into the ground now. Last year we took almost 1.2-million or 1.3-million bushel of fall crop, which exceeds the actual capacity of the current storage at that elevator. So we were forced to truck grain out just to be able to serve our patrons.”

As part of the expansion, Midland is adding five new concrete silos, three of which will hold 220,000 bushels each, while two smaller ones will hold 160,000 bushels each.

Midland has a combined storage capacity of nearly 12.6 million bushels, with elevators located in the Kansas cities of Hays, Brownell, Hargrave, La Crosse, McCracken, Natoma, Palco, Plainville, Toulon, Yocemento and Zurich.