Grain Elevators and Terminals Editing and Proofreading Services

A truck tips, the sample goes to the probe, and forty minutes later the settlement shows deductions for moisture, dockage and a grade change the driver did not expect. The farmer is now standing in an office arguing about a sample they cannot see, taken by a method they were not shown, against a schedule they have never read. Almost all of that is a writing problem.

We edit what grain elevators, terminals and handlers produce — grading and discount schedules, settlement statements and scale tickets, storage and handling agreements, delivery contracts and deferred pricing terms, sampling and retention procedures, quality and blending documentation, customer notices and price announcements, and licensing, bonding and audit material. Our editors work on the documents a producer reads while a truck is waiting.

The grading and discount schedule is where an elevator's relationship with its farmers is settled, and its failure is a table of deductions with no account of how the number was arrived at. A discount a producer cannot verify is a discount they will assume was invented. We work through these so each factor is stated with the measurement method, the instrument and the point at which the sample is taken, since moisture on a probe sample and moisture on a stream sample differ and the driver knows it; so the discount is expressed as a rate per unit over a threshold rather than as a band table alone, because a producer needs to work out what half a per cent costs before deciding to dry; so the sample retention is described — how long, who may request a retest, at whose cost and on which portion of the sample — given that a retained sample is the only thing that makes the first result contestable; so grade determination is separated from discount factors, as a grade change and a moisture deduction feel identical on a statement and are appealed differently; so any blending, commingling or house position is disclosed in terms of what happens to identity-preserved loads; so the settlement statement shows gross weight, dockage, net, each deduction with its rate and quantity, and the arithmetic; and so the appeal route names the third-party inspection option with its cost and its finality. Schedules written this way keep trucks coming back next year.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including schedules, producer data, contracts and inspection correspondence. We are editors rather than graders, inspectors or lawyers, and we offer no view on grading, discounts or contractual rights. What we can do is make the deduction explicable while the truck is still on the scale.