Holy cow, there's a lot going on here. Hey, it's me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day.
When you eat today, that food is going to get to your plate from a field like this. And before it gets in that field, it's going to pass through the hands and the wallet of a farmer like this. I say wallet because he has to use something more than likely...
call the grain bin. Today on Smarter Every Day, we're going to talk about the science, the engineering, the economics, everything that goes into using a grain bin to get food from the field to your plate. Trey, is it a really good thing to have a grain bin?
It is. Why? Oh, for logistics and economics sake that buys you time getting the grain out of the field and hopefully as the winter goes on the basis improves and you can get a higher price for your grain. Today on Smarter Every Day we're gonna talk about all that by building a grain bin and then figuring out how they use these things. Let's go get Smarter Every Day.
Music These things are everywhere. I've always called them silos, but that's not exactly right. Now it's true, these tall skinny ones are silos. They sometimes contain a special type of feed called silage for animals. But these short fat ones, those aren't silos.
Those are called grain bins. And I've been on a quest to see if I can learn everything I can know about them. My farmer buddy Trey is also an engineer who went to Auburn University.
We like to talk about mechanical problems he has to solve out on the farm. When he told me he was pouring a huge concrete pad for a grain bin that he was gonna buy, I was intrigued. The foundation for this thing was 52 yards of concrete heavily reinforced with steel rebar, and the more I thought about the forces this thing has to put up with, like wind blowing on the side of a huge structure, literally tons of grain on the inside, the scale of this concrete pad started to make more and more sense.
Trey explained that these things are sold as a kit, kits that are engineered to be assembled on-site by an expert crew. If you had a crew of only three people but no crane or tall ladder, how would you build this thing? It's over 30 feet tall and weighs several tons. The more I thought about this, the more I realized there had to be a simple clever technique that I just didn't know about. So I decided to try to work myself onto one of these crews to see what I could learn over several days.
So what do you call that tool? Punch? Yeah, just using a punch for alignment?
Yeah. What's your name, man? I'm Danny.
Danny, I'm Destin, man. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
And what was your name? Nicholas. Nicholas.
Nice to meet you, dude. Pleasure. Do you guys go all over the place doing this? That's all we do, yeah. Really?
The way it's gonna work is you're gonna build this ring and then use those jacks to do what? We'll bolt them jacks to these sidewall sheets, every other sheet, all the way around. We'll get that center pump back right there and we'll jack them all at the same time.
So it's a hydraulic pump? Uh-huh. And so you just hydraulically jack it all the way around?
Yeah. and then we put another ring on, drop our jacks, connect to the next ring, jack it up, takes the next ring, just keep pushing it up. It was immediately clear that there was a ton of work to do at this job site.
So to earn the trust of the crew, I asked Danny what is it that they did not want to do, and I immediately started doing that. So I have learned if you wanna work on a crew, It really helps to do the crap jobs because once you do that you kind of establish credibility and then they'll let you do some of the bigger stuff. But right now I'm assembling vents for the top of the roof line. I just started working and they didn't make me go away.
Music You know what's a big deal? Punches. Punches are a big deal because you stick it through one sheet of corrugated metal and use it as a lever to align that sheet of metal on the back and then you align it and then you can put a bolt through an adjacent hole. Punches are huge.
This is a fascinating engineering marvel it's a fascinating process to assemble and I always thought you know they're pretty in a field with a sunset and maybe a hay bale or something no I'm gonna think about engineering but I look at these now and I'm gonna think about punches because punches are the best at least today punches are the best Okay, we now have a completed grain bin. Now it's time to put grain in it. Trey called me out to the field a few months later when he was harvesting beans, and when I pulled up, he was offloading his combine into a truck.
I asked him if I could jump in the cab with him while he finished the last few rows. Holy cow. There's a lot going on here.
That's a lot to look at, dude. There's a lot going on. You are mentally engaged this whole time, aren't you? Oh, very much so.
See that? Instantaneous average is about two to seven days now. Which is pretty good. Do you love this?
It's pretty fun. This is pretty awesome. It seems like this is awesome when it's working right now, but it looks like there's a lot of maintenance involved in this. Oh, there is. There's a lot of maintenance, and if it breaks, it's really aggravating.
That statement was prophetic, because look at this. literally 15 seconds later a shower came out of nowhere and it hit the field we were working on. Now Trey said we should stop harvesting but he didn't want me to drive back home without the good footage I wanted because I've been wanting to ride in his combine with him for years.
So why are you why are you stopping when it's raining? Oh, I choked it down. It was at this moment that I learned that something as simple as a 30 second rain shower can lead to huge problems for a farmer. Because the crop got wet and we didn't immediately stop harvesting, it choked out the combine, which made me feel a little bit guilty because I kind of got Trey into this situation, but not really because I got to see something firsthand I've often heard about farmers.
When a farmer has a mechanical problem, they don't wait for help. They know their equipment inside and out and they grab a wrench or a tool and they just start taking things apart and fixing it immediately. It's very impressive.
This is what's most impressive to me about farming. When you break it, there's nobody to call, is there? No.
I won't lie, before I came over here, I was feeling sorry for myself because my lawnmower was bound up. Sure enough, about 40 minutes of this, Trey and his brother Clay had everything figured out and working again. Anyways, back to the beans. Here's how Clay was getting the beans into the grain bin.
How long does this take? About 10 minutes. 10 minutes, you'll get a whole bucket up, I mean a whole truck up there? Yeah, maybe 20, just depends.
So this truck can hold around 400 bushels of soybeans, some of which got rained on. And the grain bin we built can hold 48,000 bushels. So if we use this auger, and we put these wet beans in with the dry beans, how do these wet beans not spoil the whole harvest?
So one of the most important things that a bin like this can do is dry the grain. Is that correct? That's right.
This fan blows the air up and under the plenum in the bottom of the bin and then up through the grain. That's a beast of a... fan. Can we hear it? It is, we can.
Dude, that thing's eating some air, man. So Trey mentioned a plenum. Remember that flooring they put in when they were assembling the grain bin?
That's what he's talking about. It's got holes in the floor that are just big enough for the fan to blow air through, but not so big that grain falls through it to the bottom of the grain bin. That means the entire floor acts like ductwork to evenly distribute the air through the grain.
When the beans are first... loaded into the bin because it's straight out of the field the moisture level might be too high to store long-term things like mold or fungus could be an issue in order to increase the storage life the moisture has to be brought down the fan blows to the bottom of the grain and then moves up through all of the grain all the way to the top as the air passes moist grain the skin or the shell the beam gives off some of that water content and when the air passes it it raises the humidity of the air. Let's take a look at one individual bean.
The outer skin is permeable, meaning moisture can pass through it. As long as the moisture level of the air passing by the bean is significantly less than the moisture in the bean, water will exit the bean and drying occurs. As air absorbs more and more water, at some point, it doesn't want anymore.
That air then continues to move up towards the top of the bin, but now it has more water in it, so something interesting happens. This is essentially what farmers have to deal with. The bottom of the grain bin is going to dry first because that's where the moisture to bean balance ratio is and the top of the grain bin is going to dry last. Because the air can only contain so much moisture, there's only going to be a one to two foot section of the beans that are drying at any one time and that's going to start at the bottom and move all the way to the top and the farmer has to know when his beans are dry because if he gets it wrong He starts losing money.
So how do you make money? You sell grain based on what? Based on weight.
Weight. So it's not to your advantage to dry the grain out too much because it loses weight. That's right.
So you dry it for storage and then you know you would sample it and and if it's too dry you could cut it on when you got high humidity and add moisture back to it. How do you measure the moisture in the grain? Is it just like by feel? With a moisture tester.
What? Really? You got a gadget?
We've got a gadget. Alright, let's go look at the gadget. How long does it take to... It's testing.
These are 11.4. 11.4%. How did it do that? I don't know how that works.
What's an ideal moisture level in your beans? I think 12 or 12.5. I'll have to look. I can't remember. So if you get paid per...
weight of the bean right but it's measured in volume. Trey showed me a little tool called a test weight scale. You fill it up with beans and it gives you an idea for the weight of your crop based on the packing factor. So as a farmer are you trying to hit a certain moisture level and size of the bean because it's a trade-off between packing. Bigger beans are better they make you more more yield per acre, more bushels per acre, the bigger the bean.
One of Trey's neighbors is a farmer named Jeff with a much larger operation, and he happened to be selling soybeans that day, so we went down to his farm and watched the trucks get loaded up. So the ultimate reason to have a grain bin is he's selling this grain now that it's at a premium price, right? Correct. Yeah. Okay, so this is a Hall 18 Wheeler.
Look at this. Did you get a good price? He said he hopes he got a good price. Because the grain bin was almost empty, Jeff and Trey let us go inside and get a better look at how the mechanics work. The sweep's going in there.
Do you want to film that? Yeah! Holy cow! Trey explained that once the grain falls due to gravity, there's an auger that crawls around the floor and pushes the grain towards the center, where another auger that's built into the floor can push it out so it can be loaded onto the truck. He also explained that the inside of a grain bin is one of of the most dangerous places for farmers.
So you can get down in it. Right. And it can entrap you.
Right. And so you get caught up in that grain as that wall flaps in and either one gets suffocated or two get wrapped up in the auger. It would be a bad way to go.
So this is a pretty dangerous place to be. Right. And so that's why we're here. That's why we don't walk over there. And as well as if this bin was full, you wouldn't want to walk across the top of it if it had been dried or crested over or anything like that.
Because it could collapse. Like voids in the middle of it? Yep. That happens? That happens.
And also a lot of times people will get in these bins when they're augering this out. They get stopped up and try to get it unstopped or something like that. And then it'll cave in.
You'll get moving grain and you get sucked in like quicksand. You were able to enter this grain bin because it was almost empty and we were walking on the floor, but I'm really glad we could because it gave me a moment to reflect. Grain bins are super important. They're one of the most important tools for efficient farming and for the security of our food supply.
And as you know, the key to keeping grain bins like this full, it's farmers. Farmers are the backbone of America. What I'm learning about farmers like yourself, Jeff, is that you guys are good at meteorology, biology, right?
Math. You're good at engineering and making stuff work in the field and economics. So you guys have to do everything. Pretty much. We may not be good at it, but we have to do something.
I've noticed every farmer that I say that to. Accounting. Accounting.
Every farmer I say something to, they say that immediately after I mention how difficult their job is. They always say, yeah, but we ain't good at it, blah, blah, blah. Y'all are sandbaggers is what you are. Yeah. Well, you hire people that got up.
A guy that helps me with my marketing. I got a good accountant. You pay people for their services that are good, and then you try to make the rest of it work out.
So you guys are businessmen like no other. There's no other job in America like this, is there? I don't know. I stay on the farm. Yeah.
That's awesome. You guys are good. You all are sandbaggers.
I am convinced that farmers are the smartest people out there but you like to pretend like you're not. We not very smart. Whatever.
I hope you enjoyed. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Smarter Every Day. I hope you appreciate farmers. Please consider subscribing if this kind of content is what you wanna see on Smarter Every Day and be praying for my cornses every year. Doesn't work out for me.
We'll see how it goes. I think we're gonna win this year. I'm feeling good about this, cornses.