Moving Silos

Hard to get under the power lines!
Sorry, other then being a smart a-s, can't help you.

The amish take stave silos apart to move them around here. I don't know what they charge but most non amish Dairy farms are getting away from upright silos.

    Just do like Johnny Cash:

I saw a story on a big hydraulic rig a guy built to clamp on a Harvester, lift it and lay it down. Once it was down you could drive the road to where it was going to be stood back up. Probably not cheap to do. I moved and old cement stave silo once. Knock a few holes in it, ran a chain through and pulled with a 7080. It moved all the way to the ground so the track loader could scoop it up. 

There seem to be alot of opinions out there on this topic.  I will at least try to fill you in on what works for us with the pros and cons.  We chop about 200-250 tons of corn silage a year for our cow herd.  Our silo holds about 100 tons and we put the rest in an Ag-bag.  Sometimes we will put 50 tons of barley/wheat silage on the ground and cover it.  The problems we have with the Ag-bag is fox and other animals seem to like to crawl on top and poke small holes in the plastic, which causes a moldy spot.  Nothing big but enough to be irritating.  Scooping out of a bag or bunker is faster, but unless you have a gravel pad for the bag to sit on you will fight mud all winter.  I personally prefer our silo, but we are a small operation only feeding like 2000 lbs per day of corn silage.  The unloader is a PAIN to work on when something breaks, but 99% of the time it is fine, and our unloader is old.  Once a week our unloader arm has to be moved down, which means climbing that dirty chute.  But there is nothing like flipping the switches and watching the silage be conveyed up the feeder to the cows, especially if it's snowing, raining, or just plain cold outside.  With all that being said....it truly depends on the size of your operation.  If you have a bunker or ag-bag you will need to be using enough off the face to keep it fresh.  Google it on the internet, there is lots of information out there.

I've been in the poured in place silo industry for almost fifty years but sold our farm silo business 15 years ago. In this area the Mennonites are busy taking down and rebuilding concrete stave silos mostly for their own small farms. A good used stave silo can be free for taking it to worth up to $1000 if it is a popular size. As farms got larger bunker silos became more popular. We have a number of Dutch and Swiss dairy farmers and comming from Europe and they know how to manage bunker silos. The main problem with tower silos was that the unloader companies did not keep up, and a lot of that problem has to do with the lack of 3 phase electricity on farms limiting the size of motors. We are still in the industrial poured concrete business pouring silos up to 80' dia mostly for grain. www.mwisilo.com

Edited by Calvin Schmidt - 06 May 2012 at 6:23am

We moved a 24x70 stave silo.  Madison Marrietta Silo Co.  did the tear down and rebuild.  we bought new staves for the bottom course, since they get the most acid abuse.  Gave 1500$ for the silo and 3 yr old unloader.  After labor, footer wiring etc.  We had less than a third of the cost of a new silo in it, not including what the cost of a new unloader would have been.

If you can ever get to see a TV show called 'Monster Moves', one episode follows some Canucks moving a HUGE grain  silo from side of RR track !
Impressive, hate to think of the cost though.

Seems anything can be moved but a lot of time / plannng to make a route where you don't have to move/cut hydro wires. THAT would be my first task. SEE if there's a viable route to make life 'easy'. I've seen them lower silos onto flatbed trailers with cranes so that's 'easy', maybe $150/hr ?

Bottom line is well the 'bottom line'. Figure out cost of new, built on site VS total cost to take down/transport/erect old silo. Use a 'sharp' pencil ! Include 'wide load' permits, cop escorts, etc.

Jay

5 1/2 year old thread! ....but, depends immensely on what is meant by the word "silo".  And I see the original poster was kind enough to never reply back and clarify.  Some people call a "grain bin" a silo, and there's some silos you sure as heck aren't going to pick up with a crane and move!