The Elevator Underpaid Him $1.40 A Bushel For Years — His Father's Old Logbook Caught Them

Merle Tanton is 62 and he farms 640 acres outside Loda, Illinois on the same ground his father Vernon broke in 1962. The tractor he drives every spring planting and every fall harvest is the 1979 John Deere 4640 his father bought new alongside him in March of 1980 for $34,800 from the Lyman family Paxton dealership — 156 horsepower 6-cylinder 6619T turbo diesel, Quad-Range 16-speed transmission, Sound Gard cab. Merle has hauled every bushel of corn and beans off the Tanton 640 to the Iroquois County Co-op Grain elevator in Loda for 38 straight harvests. So when Holly Tanton sat down at the kitchen desk on a Sunday evening in late October 2024 with the 2024 fall harvest grain settlement check beside her father-in-law Vernon's brown leather 1980 grain settlement logbook — and ran the numbers — what she found was that the Iroquois County Co-op Grain Loda elevator had been underpaying the Tanton account by $1.40 per bushel below the Stern Equipment grain desk's published cash bid for the same delivery zone. On 41,200 bushels of 2024 corn alone, the underpayment came to $57,680. Vernon Tanton had caught a 26-cent gap in 1980 and noted it in green ink on the back page of the logbook. He'd never had a state inspector willing to come out. Holly did. She called Earl Braddock. Earl called Laney Ofstad at the Illinois Department of Agriculture Bureau of Weights and Measures. By Thursday morning October 31, 2024, Laney pulled the white 2022 Ford F-150 with state plates into the Loda elevator yard and ran a sealed 50-pound calibration weight set across the truck scale. The scale read the 50-pound weights at 47.4 pounds — the elevator had been underweighing every load by 5.2 percent since the last clean calibration in March 2018. Combined with the $1.40 cash-bid pricing gap, the four-elevator regional audit identified $24,040,000 in underpayments across 2,840 producer accounts since 2018. Preston Shriver — the elevator manager — was terminated, the Illinois Attorney General opened a criminal investigation, and the Iroquois County Co-op board voted unanimously to refund every documented producer underpayment plus 8 percent interest. The Tanton account received $164,800 in restitution on December 14, 2024. Holly logged the payment in green ink on the page facing Vernon's original 1980 entry: "Restitution Received. Vernon was right." This is the story of one $1.40-per-bushel cash-bid gap that grew from 26 cents in 1980, one brown leather logbook that held the line for forty-four years in a kitchen hutch, one sealed 50-pound calibration weight that registered at 47.4 pounds on a Thursday morning, and one 1979 John Deere 4640 that hauled honest grain off the same 640 acres for 38 straight harvests while the elevator at the end of the road did not. #JohnDeere #FarmTractor #JDFarmStories #FarmerStrong #RuralAmerica #FarmLife #FarmEquipment #Illinois #FarmStory #4640 #GrainElevator #ElevatorFraud #1979 #StateAudit