§780.708. A country elevator is located near and serves farmers. — Inbound Citations

Typically, the establishments commonly recognized as country elevators are small. Most of the establishments intended to come within the exemption have only one or two employees (107 Cong. Rec. (daily ed.) p. 5883), although some country elevators have a larger number. (See Holt v. Barnesville Elevator Co., 145 F. 2d 250.) Establishments with more than five employees are not within the exemption. (See § 780.712.) The storage capacity of a country elevator may be as small as 6,000 bushels (see Tobin v. Flour Mills, 185 F. 2d 596) and will generally range from 15,000 to 50,000 bushels. As indicated in § 780.708, country elevators are equipped to receive grain in wagons or trucks from farmers and to load it in railroad boxcars. The facilities typically include scales for weighing the farm vehicles loaded with grain, grain bins, cleaning and mixing machinery, driers for prestorage drying of grain and endless conveyor belts or chain scoops to carry grain from the ground to the top of the elevator. The facilities for receiving grain in truckloads or wagonloads from farmers and the limited storage capacity, together with location of the elevator in or near the grain-producing area, serve to distinguish country elevators from terminal or subterminal elevators, to which the exemption is not applicable. The latter are located at terminal or interior market points, receive grain in carload lots, and receive the bulk of their grain from country elevators. Although some may receive grain from farms in the immediate areas, they are not typically equipped to receive grain except by rail. (See Tobin v. Flour Mills, supra; Mitchell v. Sampson Const. Co. (D. Kan.) 14 WH Cases 269.) It is the facilities of a country elevator for the elevation of bulk grain and the discharge of such grain into rail cars that make it an “elevator” and distinguish it from warehouses that perform similar functions in the flat warehousing, storage, and marketing for farmers of grain in sacks. Such warehouses are not “elevators” and therefore do not come within the section 13(b)(14) exemption.

(c) However, it is appropriate to point out here that nothing in the definition places limits on the distance from which commodities come to the elevator for purposes other than the storage of marketing of farm products. The commodities, 95 percent of which are required by definition to come from specified distances, are those agriculural commodities received by the elevator with respect to which it performs the primary concentration, storage, and marketing functions of a country elevator as previously explained (see § 780.708). This is consistent with the emphasis given, in the legislative history, to the country elevator's function of marketing farm products, mostly grain, for farmers (see 107 Cong. Rec. (daily ed.) p. 5883). Commodities brought or shipped to a country elevator establishment not for storage or for market but in connection with its secondary, incidental, or side-line functions of selling products and services used in the operation of a farm (see § 780.610) are not required to be counted in determining whether 95 percent of the agricultural commodities handled come from rural sources of supply within the specified distances.