GREENWOOD - With 70 years of experience between them, grain elevator workers Randy Schiermann and Reed Priess are not the sort to get ruffled in the middle of harvest turmoil.

That's not to say there's nothing to get ruffled about.

As Schiermann and Priess scurry between the grain ticket printer and the moisture meter at the Midwest Cooperative's Greenwood branch office, they and the drivers of the grain-laden trucks idling on the scale know what they're up against.

The corn crop is of record dimensions. Wet weather backed up the harvest more than it's been in 42 years.

And Nebraska's grain handling capacity is about to be tested in ways that even veterans of the corn and soybean wars may not know.

Yet Schiermann betrays not the slightest strain as he tears off a load ticket from a computer printer, flings open a door to hand it to a customer and makes sure he understands who owns the grain.

"Hi-dee-ho," he says. "Is this Don's?"

He nods and waves truck and driver toward one of several dumping points.

As soon as the truck is off the scale, another one rumbles on.

Schiermann is not one to introduce the word "urgent" into a discussion of what's going on 20 miles east of Lincoln on a thankfully sunny Thursday morning. But he's not going to object to that characterization either.

"It is urgent when the corn might start dropping off," he said. "And the deer are moving now, so they're running through there knocking some of the ears off."

At the same time, "we've had 21 percent" as a high on moisture readings. "We don't like to take it that wet."

To grasp the sheer bulk and dollar value of what the state's grain storage must absorb in the next few weeks, you might want to picture a roaring avalanche in the Swiss Alps. Or thunderheads boiling toward 60,000 feet.

Greenwood, the largest of Midwest's 14 locations, can accommodate 3.2 million bushels, much of it in a long row of concrete silos along U.S. Highway 6.

On a big day, 250 to 260 incoming trucks and 200,000 bushels are not uncommon.

Midwest's Elmwood headquarters and the rest of its network - Greenwood, Eagle, Walton, Murdock, Manley, Nehawka, Otoe, Syracuse, Unadilla, Mynard, Avoca, Wabash and Dunbar - can hold 10 million bushels, about $34 million in corn at today's value.

But that's nothing compared to the approaching avalanche of grain.

The total corn crop statewide is about 1.5 billion bushels. That makes a cash corn equivalent of more than $5 billion. The expected soybean crop of 247 million bushels adds up to another $2.25 billion.

Put that together with the lateness of the harvest, and it would seem to guarantee ulcers, insomnia and a tendency to snap at anybody who creates a distraction.

But Schiermann fits in questions about his long presence at the scales even as he reads the results and hands out scale tickets without the slightest irritation.

"I came alive in '55 and I was out the door in '74," he said, placing his original part-time status between his birth and his 1970s high school graduation.

Are the cornstalks holding up as well as he is?

"They will stand out there tall and proud for so long," he said, "and then they just start going the other way."

As he speaks, a never-ending procession of trucks comes and goes - trucks often driven by men well past normal retirement age and by farmwives answering the annual call to harvest service.

There's the occasional grinning Labrador on the passenger side.

"Did you get done with the beans?" Priess calls out to a customer. "That's good."

Suzanne Stander of Murdock is among those routed westward at the Greenwood grain complex to lighten her soybean load.

Sought out later by phone, she acknowledges she's helped out husband Clifford with harvest for the last 50 years. And how has that been?

"It's OK," she said.

Clifford, who's listening in, won't let it go at that. "In 50 years, she's hauled 99 percent of the grain to town," he said.

"Women deserve a lot of credit for helping their husbands this time of year," he added.

A few miles away at Elmwood, Gayln Boesiger, manager of the Midwest grain department, realizes that his crew and Suzanne Stander and the other haulers will be seeing a lot more of each other through the scale window.

Harvesting equipment has gotten much bigger, Boesiger said. But the grain-handling capacity of elevators, especially when grain is wet and needs to be dried artificially, hasn't kept pace.

At Greenwood, the drying rate for two dryers is about 1,600 bushels an hour. In the heavy phase of corn harvest, incoming bushels can average above 20,000 an hour.

"For every one semi we've got hauling out of the elevator," Boesiger said, "we've probably got 10-15 hauling in."

And so it goes.

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or at ahovey@journalstar.com