91–100 of 134 posts
Probably coincidence but I've noticed a ton of grain articles lately, here's a trending on on reddit from today: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/nwmect/til_t...
Ya I read PG's article on getting a publicist recently. Now I wnat to know who is this company's publicist.
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I agree. The first paragraph of the article contains their reasoning behind creating it. An experienced farmer asked them to create something so that he (and his children) never had to expose themselves to that risk again. They know it is dangerous, they may manage that risk but you are a fool if you think they would prefer to run the risk rather than find a safer alternative.
This thread is a hilarious game of "I'm better than you because I know real farmers". For some reason, certain occupations seem to bring out a sanctimonious attitude in people that nobody can understand it if they're not personally doing it themselves, combined with a failure to recognize that those occupationists are diverse and one person's personal friends might feel differently from another group or even the majo…
This seems like another high tech solution looking for a problem. I'm not heavy agriculture savy but it seems to me the same could be solved by having 2 or 3 archimedes screws on the bin which could keep grain moving over time and preventing it from forming the clods. The bot could also be radio controlled and it would still remove the need of a human going in. Another pet peeve of mine is the robot-as-a-service part…
Virtually all systems will produce uneven depth as the bins are loaded. You usually either end up with an upward cone in the middle from the pile, or an inverted cone when you're using a bin spreader to distribute the grain around the bin. The other time you can have an issue is if you have a powered spreader and forget to turn it on and load the bin unevenly on one side, which could end up being a structural issue.
If grain bins are dangerous to go inside, maybe there's a low tech solution like safety lines attached to a belt similar to mountain climbing or high rise construction.
It'd need to be able to pull you out somehow - the danger here is being entrapped and squeezed in the grain, not a fall.
Can you make a big one I can drive around some sand dunes?
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"To them it's no different than trying not to land on your ass trying to pin an implement to the tractor in the mud. Going into a silo or grain hopper is not a dangerous task to them." I have been on HN since 2012 and this comment is the dumbest shit I have ever seen posted here. By a fair margin. If you climb into an enclosed space with both burial and dust explosion hazards and your internal alarms aren't going off…
Come on man, you don't need to be this rude about a disagreement. You didn't even attempt to contest the primary claim, that farmers aren't going to flock like lemmings to a product that sells safety as its primary benefit. 'Dangerous' is contextual...if the risks of a task can be mitigated with some basic safety process, is it still dangerous? Getting into a grain bin is like rock climbing...go commando and you're p…
I think this is a flawed analogy.
Although I don't do much rock climbing, I do take part in some other high consequence recreational activities. I agree that some of these risks can be mitigated with equipment and safety measures and, in fact, I don't feel like I'm courting death.
The difference here is that these are activities I have tens of thousands of reps of. Further, I am regularly practicing these activities in totally safe environments. Finally, I have mental models of thousands of different routes and locations and conditions and settings upon which to draw.
Contrast this with (for instance) entering in, and working on, a grain silo. You will not have had thousands of reps of this activity. You will not have entered thousands of different grain silos. You will not have trained for decades in practice grain silos. This is a very high consequence activity that you will have very shallow mental maps of.
I think that's an important distinction.
It suggests that regardless of equipment and processes, one should enter into (high consequence activities one has shallow mental maps of) on very high alert.
Friendly reminder that people who deal with "unsafe by office worker standards" stuff day in and day out do not shovel money at you without critical thought just because you can portray your product as improving safety. These guys aren't wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over the thought of a dangerous job. They're finding a way to be careful and mitigate the risks of the worst outcomes and then getting…
"To them it's no different than trying not to land on your ass trying to pin an implement to the tractor in the mud. Going into a silo or grain hopper is not a dangerous task to them." I have been on HN since 2012 and this comment is the dumbest shit I have ever seen posted here. By a fair margin. If you climb into an enclosed space with both burial and dust explosion hazards and your internal alarms aren't going off…
If you've ever read "Farmer Boy" about Almanzo Wilder, there's a bit where his father is telling him, he can go and live in the city, apprentice to someone and make a good living, but be dependent on other people, or he can be a farmer, take more risks with the weather and everything else, but be independent.
> The Grain Weevil powered by JLI Robotics is a mobile robot that scurries across the top of the grain inside of a storage bin performing tasks that no human should ever do. This felt like a particularly strong wording. Is it due to risk of drowning in grain? Or just an annoying task?
In Argentina, silos have been mostly replaced by silo bags with grain inside. Like this one: https://agroverdad.com.ar/2019/04/como-lograr-en-8-pasos-un-...
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It's one thing to take your safety into your own hands when it's your backyard. It's another thing to decline to implement procedures and safety measures that put someone else's life at risk. The romantic notion of the old man and his sons wringing out an existence on the family 40 is rapidly disappearing. Most of the grain production in the US is from massive farming corporations with tens of thousands of acres. At…
Most farms are not large corporate. It is one guy and the hired hand farming 3000 acres. Legally they are corporations, but it is still small