CBH Group, Australia’s largest co-operative and a leader in the Australian grain industry, is rolling out its biggest permanent storage upgrade program in history with the grain handler signing off on three major construction contracts in April, The West reports. Broomehill, Lake Grace, Gairdner, Dowerin, McLevie, Wickepin, Narngulu, Cranbook and Dulyalbin are in line for upgrades ranging from 60,000 to 236,000 tonnes. CBH unveiled the $150 million plan in April, revealing it would upgrade the nine sites with more than 700,000 tonnes of storage, combined, by harvest.Once complete, CBH’s permanent network storage would be more than 1.45 million, 650,000 of which was installed last year ahead of WA’s second-biggest harvest.CBH project delivery general manager Andrew Porter, said work would be complete between July and September. “It’s important to listen to what our harvest is telling us,” he said. “A lot the sites we are building this year have been what I would refer to as ‘heavily subscribed’ or ‘oversubscribed’ and we could see the sites that needed the expansion.” The works mark the phase of CBH’s $750 million Network Strategy, which was announced in 2016 and included a plan to create “100 super bins” in WA.CBH has spruiked the strategy as a way to focus its attention on the 100 grain receival sites that receive 90 per cent of the State’s average crop. CBH’s storage and handling system currently receives and exports around 90 per cent of the Western Australian grain harvest and is regarded as one of the best in the world. THE WEST