Huge Commercial Grain Elevator Collapse

good morning everyone I do have some pretty big updates to start off the wheels are turning on the farm as they always are this time of year spring is definitely approaching although we're working on winter stuff we're also looking into planting season already the major news is that this weekend we had our first egg laid in the chicken cpop which is exciting that was kind of a Hal truth because one of these ladies laid it outside of the chicken cop in the run so we'll work on that Allie's definitely excited because she's been looking forward to some eggs and now they're starting to show up we got to get started on our work we're kind of entering a fake spring after a really harsh couple weeks of a true winter it's going to be in the 50s to 60s here for the next couple of weeks which is unusual for February although not impossible so I'm guesstimating that in another couple weeks it's probably going to cool way back down we'll get a little more of our soft ground work done you're not going to kill the chickens are you poor planning on my part should have started my truck earlier nice and frosty this morning stick around because I am going to show you guys something crazy that happened in the local area last week you will not believe the scale of Destruction that occurred at a local grain elevator and I just happened to be going up that way with my semi later this morning so maybe I'll stop and look at it before I start chitchatting about updates here at the bide at the main Farm I need to get my haggy started because I'm running it up to sigh hoppers at Planters Precision he's the local Precision planting expert most of you who are farmers know what Precision planting is it's an aftermarket parts company and actually they even have OEM stuff now with a few companies just not John Deere their name is a little misleading because they do offer more than just planning parts and what we're interested in is a boom recirculation system for our 2021 heggy actually no it's a I think it's a 2019 20 whatever it's a two to three to four to 5year Old heggy that was very vague as well as of a few weeks ago she's got two new batteries in it so I'll to fire right [Laughter] up I'm going to be a gentlemen and let the haggy warm up a tiny bit before we take it down the road it's not very far a size about 6 or seven miles in roundabout farming way they're almost our neighbors cuz they're up the road your neighbors in today's farming world is not the same as 30 40 years ago cuz there's not a farm on every section it's a lot less farm so the ones who get closer to Arms Reach are the people I guess you'd call your neighbor I wanted to let you know that York bco did stop by to this North Bean bin that gave us all sorts of issues at the beginning of the year and according to them they have it fixed we don't know for sure just because we're not hauling out of it we moved the conveyor down started working on other bins and we'll get back to this when we get to it here is the original fiding out of this bin I believe this is 8 in fiding you can see that it's starting to crack and wear and there's chips out of certain pieces you get to the center something side of the screw and it's not looking too hot it definitely was getting warn did it need replaced I don't know I mean you could argue about it all day it's kind of like my old man he's getting old and brittle he's got some battle wounds but you could still get a few more years out of it if he wants to keep working this was the main issue though in here where the center sweep auger thing attaches was worn off or broken off and it was one of those things where it just made more sense to go ahead and replace the whole flight it was close enough to warn out that you really weren't wasting too much money I mean we probably could take this to a welding shop I don't exactly know because when you start to weld on these if gets too hot it warps it I mean you're just creating a lot of issues sometimes it's easier just to get a brand new one they put the new one in and then they replac the part that attaches to the bin on the inside to drive the sweep auger like I said I don't know entirely whether or not the sweep is working though there was a huge pile of beans on the ground from them running it so I guess it is other news we spent the last week or two cing all of the bins here at the main Farm the bean bin is almost empty and it would be if the sweep wasn't broken and we pulled enough loads to kind of increase the longevity of the bins I'm not going to talk about how that works right now basically depending on the size of the bin you pull more loads out pulling that core down which is the most subject to going off grid in the long term with corn probably not an issue when most of the Corn is 13 to 15% that's a relatively reasonable moisture percentage for storing long term small bin like this two or three loads will core it 36t bins probably five loads to core each one the 48 Footers because they're bigger we try to pull about 10 loads so these are all good to go presumably to store for a while and the reason we do that and not just empty everyone as we go is because we don't know what the future holds we like to maintain the storability if that's even the word of the bins as opposed to just focusing on one specific bin it's a better use of our time and then we'll come back and reevaluate when we want to start actually emptying the bins I'm long- winded enough that the heggy is probably getting close to warm so we'll leave shortly the nice thing about the new bin is the staircase that makes it super easy for me to actually climb up here with the camera and show you what's going on the bins with the ladder are almost impossible for me to bring this big camera up because I need a backpack or something you need two two hands to climb a ladder on the bin at least you need two hands if you care about your life I just wanted to come up and visualize what cing looks like here's the new 48f footer as you can presume we had it filled all the way to the top so there was a cone upwards coring it is just pulling the cone all the way down if I understand correctly you actually don't have to pull the cone all the way down you just kind of want to get it level but we go ahead and pull it down we've never really had issues of corn bins going off I don't think that's really a testament to our ability to store corn Corn's just easy to keep in good condition when Jeff and I are running both trucks out of these bins we can load fast if there's not a long line at the elevator we can haul 10 to 12 loads a day pretty easy as long as there's no issues anywhere so coring these is really not that much of a challenge so we like to get it done when we can if we just skipped our 3-hour launch and our cigarette braks every hour we could probably actually get 15 to 16 loads a day but we don't want to work too hard it's job [Music] security the top of my lengthy wish list is a shed that you pull into and out of you don't back out of because it's very hard to see with some of this stuff especially when you got a conveyor right here to your East yeah just like riding a bike a weird bike but a bike nonetheless getting this thing out of the sheds got me all excited for planting and spraying season I try to be eternally optimistic when it comes to these things I'm thinking record yields everything's going to go great I know historically there's a lot of yields where none of that happens we have horrible planning seasons and poor yields we've been lucky the last few years to have some easy Seasons yields have been all over the place mostly strong I just know that mother nature finds a way to balance the scales out across the United States every once in a while who knows could be a hard year we may have to wait till June to go to Arizona or Florida as opposed to just going miday we got the heggy up the road dropped off at size place they said they should have it done within a few days it's not their first one so don't think there'll be any major hiccups it's not really a terribly complicated process it's just not easy at the same time a lot of Plumbing work to get all of the Boomin back to the main tank with control valves and all that stuff so precision's got it handled confident in their ability now on to our next project I can't recall if I talked about it or not Precision is installing their reclaim system it's a aftermarket recirculating boom system for a sprayer that's not equipped with pwm nozzles it's relatively simple I'm sure I mentioned that and it's just going to help with efficacy of spray products lack of crop damage when you start first thing from sediments and other contaminants in your boom from a counter crop chemical and that's the goal there is just to do a better job spraying it's a relatively minimal C cost I'm thinking just over five figures so I think 11 12 $133,000 for the install should help me do a better job for my family as I'm spraying and that's really my goal sometimes you just got to spray money spray money spin money to do better work it's not a huge upgrade especially when you consider going the John Deere route it's probably $40,000 to do the same thing the old cats using a little bit of oil should throw some more in there before I take off with this I guess to start of today's video is all about spray stuff because took the hegy up there to size and now I got to go get my tanker that's been in a shop in arola for the last two weeks getting a sparge tube system installed to help mix our chemicals better you kind of see the picture here spend a little bit of money to help improve the performance of our farm don't know how much to add just going to get some 15 w40 somewhere is it even a caterpillar if it ain't burn a little bit of oil good part of life [Applause] [Applause] okay we are headed north to pick up our tanker speaking of this truck I don't remember if I told you that the had to put a new alternator in it that's what was giving me power issues a few weeks ago I think I told you but I'll remind you if you didn't know our Cola is about 10ish miles north of matun and our Farm's about 7 or 8 Miles Southwest of matun so 20 M it's not exactly a straight shot and we'll be where we need to go once you get north of maton this is God's country up here You Can See For Miles High productivity soil a lot of times the hardest part up here because there's not much change in elevation is draining Farms with some subsurface systems you can have to go miles up here if there's not a local drainage District tile installed to find an outlet that'll effectively move the water off of these Farms if you can drain these swamps up here though it is quite literally the best ground in the world to grow corn soybeans it sells like it's the best ground too because this stuffs1 18 19 $220,000 an acre Plus right now about 2 miles in the distance you can see this monstrous grain facility straddling Route 45 it belongs to TGM who we do a lot of business with down south is AR Cola facility and some of you may be familiar with this facility based on what happened up here last week holy smokes are those cranes I see at least three cranes up in the air right now trying to repair the damage from a ginormous cranin collapse up here I get a little closer I'll try to find a spot to park and maybe be a little bit nosy between the normally dense traffic at this intersection an added amount of possible Spectators driving around checking out the Carnage and of course the intense efforts to clean up the corn and repair this massive commercial elevator I opted to not get out of the truck and film it just wasn't a good opportunity I did snap a few pictures and I am going to commentate over some clips and footage in this first picture we are to the southeast of TGM and Arc Cola you can see that this is a fairly large grain elevator the leg or conveyor over the top is visibly bent knocked over the outload bin which is kind of adjacent to it on the left side is also destroyed or definitely compromised so there's a lot of very visible damage to this from just this Southeast angle you can't really see the extent of the damage though because the broken bin is tucked behind this other massive bin on the left side of the image if you do look kind of towards ground level there is a lot of corn back there and if you look really closely you can see the GSI emblem on the side of the bin laying on the ground the neighboring business to the South had a couple of security camera angles pointed directly this way just happened to catch the destruction as it went down check this out could you imagine what that car is thinking right now look at that b buckles down below and then about Midway to 2/3 of the way up it just breaks I'm not an engineer so I'm not going to begin to speculate about what went bad there bad panel missing bolts maybe anchor bolts broke supposedly this was an 800,000 bushel bin give or take a few bushel only five or 6 years old TGM did not build this bin because they bought the facility 2 or 3 years ago so it was already built when they bought the facility that car he's probably like what the heck it is very fortunate because dust like that if it is from the corn grain if that is corn dust a spark could cause a very quick and immense fire almost because that corn dust is flammable although that could just be from the gravel getting pushed out I would speculate that the scale house did get destroyed based on that angle that's crazy crazy you might need to go back and watch that a time or two folks that was a lot of corn it was a full 800,000 bushel bin and here folks courtesy of some drone images from a local farmer is a good overhead view of the aftermath I want to start by saying the Silver Lining here is that not a single soul was hurt because of this incident the neighboring houses do look like they took on some corn I believe TGM did relocate them to a hotel or something just because of the inconvenience of the Corn coming into their house I mean you wouldn't want corn encroaching into your garage and stuff this incident occurred at 6:30 so if this had happened you know at 3:00 in the afternoon someone could have been standing there and you would not have survived that if you were under that bin and that corn fell on you you are essentially dead it really makes you think twice about being by some of these commercial bins of this size and there's a lot of them at some of these elevators that we sit right next to in line however however this is a oneoff event this type of grain bin destruction doesn't seem to happen very often we can always begin to speculate about what might have caused it it was full corn is heavy obviously a structural compromise of some type based on the video evidence the bottom ring is actually what gave way first and that weakness down below created the Extrusion up top where the grain piled out of these grain bins are very strong when they are completely attached together in unison however once they start to break they become very weak usually full grain bins are more structurally sound from wind damage and tornadoes because of the Corn inside it looks like though that if they're not structurally sound at a foundational level on the outside there's nothing that's going to keep that corn in you're looking at 800,000 bushels on the ground that TGM has to clean up because 800,000 bushels even with the today's depressed grain prices is $3 million worth of corn and a lot of that is not their corn because grain elevators cannot speculate on the price of corn they can only speculate on basis which is that small margin in between the Futures price and the cash price and that's where elevators make their money so a lot of this money on the ground in a roundabout way is the farmers but because it's on TGM property the farmers are not liable here so they'll still continue to maintain their paper ownership of corn bushels if they have them and TGM has to pick up the physical bushels at their facility here's an overhead angle you can see that the bottom three or four rings of corn is still in the bin I assume if the electrical Works they could still outload the bin normally once they got the top cleaned up the neighbors definitely have some corn in their house and their garage it's just going to be a long process for TGM to pick this up I believe companies do exist that specialize in this kind of cleanup all of this stuff that's picked up off the ground will need filtered because you get rocks in there I mean no in user wants a rock going through their system they only want corn they'll have to do a good job of getting all of that out and just look at this bin I mean it's coiled over I don't know if that other big bin is compromised I would think that there's a good chance it might be based on the way this fell they lost the overhead they lost the conveyors we're looking at just this bin alone if it cost $2 to $3 a bushel to build a commercial bin of this size I don't know let's say somewhere between two and a$2 and5 million just for the bin concrete may be fine so I don't know if they have to replace that you've got unless the concrete was the issue and if insurance is paying for it all you might go ahead and replace everything I I'm sure when this is all send done between clean up new bins and stuff there's no way that this facility is not going to have A5 plus million doll Bill to rebuild this bin if they even do I would think they would and get everything back to operating normally I'll just go ahead and show a few more angles that this farmer drone pilot provided excellent photography really I just want to emphasize how much corn 800,000 bushels is we don't even grow 800,000 bushels on our entire Farm in one year this elevator has 800,000 bushel on the ground I'd love to hear your conjecture and theories in the comments below or what you know about the situation obviously we like working with TGM other than their long lines down in yoga you hate for them to have a facility go down like this especially one that's probably pretty useful to farmers in the arola area although some of those guys are probably heading straight to Decor anyways they skip the local elevator that can't entirely be true considering that this facility is right next to the rail what do you guys think happened bad anchor bolts bad panels temperature change because it was like 20° outside and then came up to 60 within the same week stretch the metal too much heavy corn in the bin it wasn't built right there's a million different reasons why this could have happened yeah drop a comment below the end of the day like I've said numerous times we can be thankful that no one got hurt okay enough sightseeing time to pick up our tanker I see it almost immediately because I wrapped the engine up with a tarp to keep some of the moisture out of it I'll come over this way go inside and pay and check out what we're looking [Music] at we got our belov tanker with some awesome upgrades I'll show you what we did when we get back home happy to have it done bulk Tech and arola is where we had the work done I think jobs like this is more of Moonlighting for them they're kind of lowkey here but supposedly they have a fleet of over like 500 tankers I think that's what I heard and they lease them all out they maintain them so that's the bulk of their business is maintaining their own Fleet and then occasionally they work in a gracious customer like us to help improve our tanker so glad they got us in this offseason we're ready to roll for spring man you can see the cranes hoisted way in the air from the East side of town take one last look at the project before we heads South I don't envy those guys today jeez it's kind of comical the number of farmers you see driving by to check out the damage there's guys from mun up in this area and I know they're here to see what's going on in the elevator so here is our 7,000 gon tanker we bought last year it's a 1991 Briner it was a four compartment those of you who followed along in the Saga since we acquir this we had the welding shop in sigle cut it down to a two compartment taker they cut the bulkheads out in the middle of each intermediary compartment into baffles so now we have two big compartments we acquired this pretty close to planning season had the work done on it and by the time we were pulling it out of the welding shop it was almost time to start spraying Helena plumbed it up for us they did a really good job color Cod everything and to the best of their ability they installed an agitation system on the front and the back all they did was put this te out of the pump and run one line to the front into a valve going in and a pipe against the wall to stir a little bit and they did the same on the back that way we could select where we were agitating to the problem with that is is when this compartment is fully loaded dumping it into the top does a lot on the top but it really does not tickle down on the bottom when we're spraying products that are likely to settle out like your atrain that becomes an issue that you don't even really notice till the tanker is empty and when you go to empty the tanker or it's down at the bottom you see a bat of latex looking paint stuff on the bottom you know your asine was not getting mixed and although it's not a huge issue it is reducing the efficacy of your spray solution and just wasting product overall so we had bulk Tech install what is more of an advanced agitation system just not standard on most tankers and that is a sparged tube you can see they actually did the plumbing for me I was shocked out of Helen te here's the first sparge tube Inlet it does the first compartment and then the other side is a separate one it does the back compartment the sparge tube is essentially this 2in stainless steel line that runs all the way front to back it has a hole about every 16 in I believe about the size of a penny and the sparge tube holes are pointed down against the wall of the tanker and when that pump is running into the tube it pushes that product down in a jet like fashion against the tanker and rolls the whole load basically this guarantees that the bottom which is the most likely to settle out and place where chemicals will be gets mixed up into the entirety of the load this is a really big upgrade for us in terms of chemical quality out of our tanker as I mentioned we have one on the back end of the tanker and then one on the front end of the tanker plums separately although most of the time we're carrying the same exact chemical load front and back there are a few occasions where we might have a little mix of a trial product or something in one compartment and it's really nice to be able to agitate them separately as well on the front and the back of the tubes there is a cleanout cap so if the holes get plugged up or I want to run some clean water out I take this cap out so about the only thing I'm not sure I agree with is putting a plastic cap on the end of a stainless steel system you're just asking for trouble I'm probably going to order some 2in stainless threaded caps to put on here because if this does break which it shouldn't it's going to empty your entire compartment of chemical on the ground and that would be a nightmare that's pretty much what we had done it doesn't sound very exciting but I will show you the Firepower of this mixing system once it warms up a little bit and I'm ready to dewinterize the tanker for now though I'm going to leave my coolant in the pump because it may get cold again I don't want to screw with having to winterize it another time we were getting ready to back this thing into the shed and then Dad and I had a conversation about the tires you know should would go ahead and work on them if they need work and I said I noticed that one of our tires was getting some really nasty weather cracking around the outside or showing his age which is surprising cuz the tread is phenomenal I don't know how that happened and so we are going to go ahead and take this into Neil Tire shortly should have just done it on my way back through it just wasn't a conversation Dad and I had till I got back home the guys at Neil tires said that that will probably blow sooner rather than later especially when it gets warm outside oh you're back you're hitting the head with a B A Drop Court dad and Jeff checked another bin site it looks like it's going to be close to firm enough to haul some corn and core a few other bins so we're kind of moving that direction right now push stop pulling it in were they trying to you going uh not really he's get hit that way okay get there we going hit the [Applause] Greaser [Applause] Square H it [Applause] [Music] down I'm to get a hammer or something got [Applause] turn that right there a little further [Music] yeah so one of the two people working on that project bent the doors on that trailer a few weeks back working when it was frozen outside and based on the physical condition of our bodies there the person with two arms is probably the culprit although I may never admit to that dad helped me get it bent back into shape I thought we'd have to cut it off and just get new brackets but he's pretty crafty with a hammer and a cutting torch so figured it out it works fine just need some paint One new Tire on the tanker trailer later and we're bringing it back home and store in the shed for another six or eight weeks much to my surprise the sun actually feels warm today for the first time in months it is legitimately warm on my skin which isn't necessarily a good thing for someone who's prown to skin cancer at this young age surprisingly some of these Farms are actually starting to gray off a little bit not all of them the really wet ones are obviously still holding a lot of moisture they are areas though where it stayed like this for another 7 days if that you could probably do some field work which is unusual for February easy work's done now we got to get this thing backed in the shed [Applause] somehow [Music] that took up way more space than I was expecting it to I must have miscounted my steps when I walked it off or it's longer than I realized I think it's a 40ft trailer but tanker's pretty much an afterthought until things start to pick up a little bit more in the spring for now now we're hooked up and ready to haul grain if we get an opportunity to Jeff's obviously working on that as we speak we'll probably be joining him after we get a few more things checked off our to-do list anyways that's going to be it for this video I'm taking off going to go hang out with the family for a little bit as always I greatly appreciate every single one of you continuing to tune in and support the channel your viewership means a world to me catch you all in the next episode until then make sure you like the video If you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and comment down below if you have any questions you know I love to talk about farming have have a great day everyone [Music] peace

Channel: aTrippyFarmer

Views: 109,657

Keywords: farming, farm life, farm vlog, farmer, combine, agriculture, corn, tractor, illinois, seed, drones, a trippy farmer, atrippyfarmer, vlog, john deere, farm, farming videos, tractor stuck, cole the cornstar, millennial farmer, welker farms, equipment, tractors, harvest, tillage, farms, spring, farming simulator 19, soybean, usa farming, fs19, horsepower, new tractor, crash course, technology, farming simulator, limestone, s780, dozer, crawler, fertilizer, nh3, tornado, damage, destruction, caught on camera

Id: _SmSIPgtQ7I

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024