At the Quattro Ports grain terminal at Port Kembla, they’re loading grain into ships in huge volumes.

Terminal manager Dene Ladmore said a five-hatch ship could carry as much as 10,000 tonnes of grain in each hold.

At a load rate of 1500 tonnes an hour, it could take as long as eight hours to fill that hatch.

And they have to fill it in a certain way, otherwise the grain can move around while at sea and cause serious issues for the ship’s navigation.

This loading includes a process of filling in the gaps called “stitching”.

“We tend to start right in the middle [of the hatch] and then work our way around the hatch,” Mr Ladmore said.

“Then at the end you’ve got stitch it up and down and across to make sure it’s pretty level. Any bulk product like that will flow up and down and side to side once you get out to sea.”

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The Quattro terminal is the smaller of the two grain terminals at Port Kembla. Officially opened last year, the facility has 17 silos with a total capacity of 100,000 tonnes.

The facility accepts grain from the Central West of NSW. It’s predominantly wheat with around  20 per cent barley and 10 per cent canola.

“What happens is your local grower in the Central West is a pretty small fish,”Mr Ladmore said.

“They’ll sell their grain to a trading house, the trading house might put together a little bit more [from other growers] and send it to one of the larger exporters.”

That’s when it arrives at the grain terminal – either by rail or road.

By rail the grain is carried in what are called “bottom dumpers” – because they dump the grain via hatches in their belly.

The grain then drops onto an underground conveyor belt and is then carried into what is called a “hospital” silo.

It sits there while the staff in the terminal’s lab test the grain to check the protein and moisture levels and to make sure there are no insects in it.

Once it gets the all-clear, it’s moved into another silo.

Grain that comes in via truck has to wait while a sample is tested before it’s unloaded into a silo.

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“Live insects are a bit of a problem in the grain industry,” Mr Ladmore said.

“If we do find live insects we’ll either reject the truck or, if [the grain is] already in the terminal, we’ll have to fumigate the silo.”

Once a cargo ship arrives to pick up a load of grain – it mainly goes to China, but the Middle East, Europe and Asia have also been destinations – one of a series of hatches opens up at the bottom of the silo.

A long conveyor runs underneath each row of silos to catch the grain. As the level of the grain in the silo decreases, the other hatches are opened in turn (to open them all at once risks crushing the silo due to the sudden change in pressure).

At the base of the silo is a sweep, which is used to move the grain from the edges to the centre where the hatches are.

Before the grain is piped into the hatches, quarantine officers at the port check them to make sure they’re suitable for carrying foodstuffs.

If a ship has been carrying something else recently, the crew will clean the hatches with seawater while waiting to come into the port.

The level of activity in the terminal is dependent on the weather; not at Port Kembla but in the Central West where the grain is growing. The less grain that grows, the less there is to transport to the grain terminal.

“In a quiet year you don’t fill the whole silo system,” Mr Ladmore said.

“We’ve got silos out there that haven’t been filled since July last year.”

Which is why the terminal has a sideline business in selling fertiliser. Trucks delivering grain can pick up a load of fertiliser and take it back to the farm, to help kickstart the next delivery for the terminal.