The CBH Group is continuing to build its network and infrastructure to cater for expected bigger annual crop production in Western Australia, which has been pitched as high as 28-30 million tonnes over the next decade.
When quizzed about how the co-operative settled on that figure, CBH Group chief executive officer Ben Macnamara said they have done a lot of work on what the future looked like.
"If you look at it historically, the growth rate in the crop size has been in the three per cent plus mark," Mr Macnamara said.
"If you extrapolate out to 2033, that's sort of where you land."
He pointed to factors that would drive WA crop production.
"The first one is around seed technology - we have seen some fantastic investment in new seed varieties," Mr Macnamara said.
"InterGrain here in WA is doing an outstanding job, some of their barley varieties have been yielding particularly well for graingrowers of WA - I think that is playing a role.
"I think technology when it comes to equipment is continuing to improve, so whether that is seed placement at seeding time or whether that is from a harvesting perspective around their harvesting capacity to reduce crop risk."
Mr Macnamara said improvements in agronomic practices, such as deep ripping, were also a factor.
He described WA graingrowers as "outstanding", who were constantly getting better at what they did.
"They have demonstrated that over 90 years of CBH's history and I am sure they will continue to demonstrate that as we go into the future," Mr Macnamara said.
He said the co-operative had a lot of challenges to process the bigger predicted crops and meet market demands and expectations.
Mr Macnamara said their capital plan would address various supply chain bottlenecks.
The Agriculture Supply Chain Initiative has secured $160 million in Federal government funding and $40m from the State, which is being invested into 11 rail sidings, a rail line upgrade between Carnamah and Mingenew, as well as some money being set aside for the reopening of some rail lines in the south.
Mr Macnamara singled out the Brookton siding upgrade as a key example, where the site lengthening would reduce the amount of rail wagon shunting required, speeding up CBH's ability to load trains.
An extra two kilometres of rail sidings and more rail loading infrastructure at Broomehill is another significant upgrade.
"At Broomehill it used to take us in excess of 10 hours to load roughly 40 wagons," Mr Macnamara said.
"This investment will enable us to load 60 wagons in three or less hours, meaning we can get that grain to port quicker and it also enables us to have a passing loop in the Albany zone, meaning we can run additional fleets, which is why we have got additional fleets coming.
"Then it comes down to the number of units - the number of train sets that we have got.
"So the more train sets we have got, the more grain obviously we can get to port and that is in essence why we are doubling our fleet."
Mr Macnamara said in time they would see the bottlenecks moving to the ports, so they would focus on the rail sidings to ports and grids at the ports, as well as ship loaders, and in some instances having additional storage capacity at those ports as well.
He said to get projects of his magnitude underway, they have started discussions with government departments, port authorities and engineers.
Mr Macnamara said on top of that there was the hot topic of regulatory approvals and they had invested a lot from their side to get projects up and running in a timely manner, working proactively with governments and relevant agencies.
He made the comments when the grower-owned co-operative released its 2023 annual report in mid-December, which outlined the financial and operational performance for the year ending September 30.
CBH reported a group surplus of $353.3m for the 2023 financial year, driven by the record harvest of 22.9mt (for 2022-23), record shipping volumes and favourable export margins early in the financial years.
