Grain Storage Best Practices

August 2025 Edition: 

Grain Storage Best Practices by: Josh Wilhelm

With harvest underway, it’s a good time to think about best practices for grain storage to help protect your investments.  Commodity storage has many factors that can make it more successful, so let’s go through what it takes to give you the best chances to protect your crops from insect damage.

Prevention:

The best way to store grain properly is to take the time to properly prepare your bins prior to introducing grains to them.  Most infestations in grain start from poor sanitation from previous grains being held.  Build-up on walls, unemptied augers, and dirty aeration can harbor insect populations that lead to further infestation once grain is introduced.  Take the time to clean all these areas as well as the bin perimeters to reduce the likelihood that insects are present prior to binning after harvest. 

Once the bins are cleaned, a pre-binning treatment will help remove any unwanted insects in the bins and on the exterior.  The exterior of the bins should be treated with a longer-lasting chemical to help reduce infestation risk from the exterior.  The interior of the bins should be sprayed with a grain protectant or chemical that will help reduce any residual insect activity after cleaning.  I prefer to use a chemical such as Centynal Synergized in the interior spray.  This chemical will last and is safe to use on most grains that might still be in the bin.  Chemical fogging is an extra option to treat the higher spaces of the bin that cannot be treated by traditional residual spraying.  The combination of sanitation and these treatments will give you a great start to successful grain storage and insect mitigation.

Treatment:

A good option for long-term storage of grains is a grain protectant.  Grain protectants are applied during the binning process and are evenly distributed on the grains through a liquid or dry application.  Grain protectants provide a longer-term storage solution to reduce the risk of infestation during the grain holding process.  If done during harvest correctly, you should expect very good results and very limited insect populations in the grain during overwintering.  Gravista is a great chemical option for preventative grain treatment for long-term storage of most grains.

If you find yourself with insects in your grain, there is no better option than fumigation.  Once insects have created populations in your grains, you will see excessive CO2, hotspots in temperatures, and IDK(Insect Damaged Kernels).  Insects will thrive during grain storage regardless of exterior temperatures, so it is important to mitigate them through fumigation once found.  It is common practice to treat vulnerable commodities such as wheat with fumigation prior to overwintering to protect the commodity. 

Storage:

Once your harvest is ready to be overwintered, it is important to cool the grains to a suitable temperature.  Utilize the cool overnight temperatures to help reduce the core temperature of the grain mass.  Insects will reduce movements, feeding, and reproduction as the temperatures decline.  Once the grain hits 50°F, you will see that insect activity has subsided until it is warmed in the spring.  It is important to watch hot spots in the grains once cooled, because this is a sign of insect populations in the grains.  Follow the best practices to make sure this does not happen in your grain storage.