Tool Reduces Grain Bin Risks

Tony Bestwick/Chief, Fire Department – City of York, Nebraska: “Bin rescue is very dangerous.  Low frequency/high risk is what we call it.” 

Tony Bestwick/Chief, Fire Department – City of York, Nebraska: “You can’t just have them come in through the door, because what does that do?  The grain comes down on them, right?  So, if you’ve got a bad situation, and then you just make it worse with this cascading grain.”  

York, Nebraska Fire Chief Tony Bestwick’s crew have struggled with rescuing farm workers trapped in grain bins.  

Tony Bestwick/Chief, Fire Department – City of York, Nebraska: “It’s a very stressful situation.”

Bestwick cautions that time is key.  Experts say an adult can be submerged in a bin filled with corn or soybeans in as little as 20 seconds – a tragedy all too common in rural America.

Zach Hunnicutt/Giltner, Nebraska: “Someone in their family, or a neighbor, or somebody they know… I think just about every farmer that is around grain bins has a story of someone they know that has lost their life in a grain bin.”  

Safety is top of mind for fifth generation Nebraska row crop producer Zach Hunnicutt.  Just a child when his grandfather’s brother died in a grain bin accident, today he follows proper, established protocols to move harvested raw commodities out of storage for buyers.  But risky situations can persist, and one trip to town saw Hunnicutt instigate a homegrown tech start-up whose mission became “no boots in the grain”.

Ben Johnson/Chief Innovation Officer & CO-Founder – Grain Weevil Corporation: “We were building a robot and we were showing that to people at church and showed that to a family friend of ours, who farms, and he said: If you can build that robot, you should build me a robot to keep me and my kids out of the grain bin.”

Ben Johnson and his father Chad had never set foot in a grain bin before they invented the Grain Weevil, an autonomous robot that cruises through grain loads on a pair of mini-augers, busting up clumps and surface crusting – to maintain profitable product.  They say their machine also minimizes lung complications and combustion issues associated with concentrated grain dust.

Chad Johnson/Chief Executive Officer & CO-Founder – Grain Weevil Corporation: “I like to tell people, it’s like…every dad’s dream to build robots with their kid – and people look at me kind of funny.  I say ok, every nerd dad’s dream.”

With a love of robotics fostered by his educator father, Ben earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska – Omaha.  Their business went from father and son building prototypes at home in small town Aurora, to a shop in the state’s largest metro area, over 10 employees, two issued patents - and several more in the works.  

Private capital and federal grant money are helping Grain Weevil iron out technical hurdles and finalize their manufacturing process – which they claim will unleash a monetized ecosystem of insurance, finance, farmers and ancillary businesses.  They’ve targeted the second quarter of 2025 for a full product rollout.

Ben Johnson/Chief Innovation Officer & CO-Founder – Grain Weevil Corporation: “It started in the shed just putting it together with whatever we had.  Now you can see we’ve really grown the team and been able to engineer this thing to be powerful and capable inside the bin.” 

Grain Weevil assures just one of their robots alone can manage up to 250,000 bushels.  This fall, they will unveil BinAssist, with partners across the Midwest, trained to run a fleet of 30 robots and provide specialized services to local areas.

Chad Johnson/CEO & CO-Founder – Grain Weevil Corporation: “Take one bushel of grain, and follow that along the supply chain.  We can actually capitalize on that one bushel of grain on the farm, at the co-ops, in the transportation, at the food processing facilities – all have use cases for the robot.”

For Hunnicutt, whose grain bins were proving ground for the Grain Weevil, it’s an idea that’s come home to roost.

Zach Hunnicutt/Giltner, Nebraska: “It’s just been cool to see that evolution.  We’ve created a lot of technological solutions, in other places on the farm, to protect us from unnecessary risks and this is one of the final frontiers.”  

Dr. Aaron Yoder/Associate Professor – University of Nebraska Medical Center: “We try to find the most current research on keeping the grain in good quality at conferences like this. Whether it’s through - just management techniques, or we can remove the human from hazardous situations…using a robot to do that would be a great example.”

University of Nebraska Medical Center Associate Professor Dr. Aaron Yoder performs grain bin safety outreach on behalf of his institution’s Central States Center for Agricultural Safety and Health.  

Dr. Aaron Yoder/Associate Professor – University of Nebraska Medical Center: “Often times people will go inside the bin to either check the quality of the grain, or to do something if it goes out of condition.  It gets lumpy.  It gets moldy.  They’ll go in to try to break up some of those blockages that might prevent the grain from flowing.  When I see things like that, I get tremendously sad, because we know it could be preventable.”

Grain Weevil sought Yoder’s expertise on safety compliance – along with Nationwide Insurance, the country’s largest agricultural insurer.  

Nationwide conducts an annual Grain Bin Safety Week and has donated manufactured “rescue tubes” to various rural fire departments, including York, Nebraska.  

First responders are grateful for specialized additions to their toolbox, but as grim headlines of grain bin catastrophes continue to trickle out of Husker country, the sense of urgency is palpable.

Chad Johnson/CEO & CO-Founder – Grain Weevil Corporation: “We gotta hurry.  We gotta do this as fast as we possibly can…but we can’t.  We have to do it right. It takes a lot to develop a machine this complicated.  It really does motivate us though.  It keeps us pushing.  It keeps us moving forward.  We know, every two weeks that we don’t get one done, somebody’s losing a father or a son or a mother that’s in there helping.  It’s tough.”

For Market to Market, I’m Josh Buettner.