Something that I've always wondered about anytime I see farming videos is how they store their grains.  Some guys just use an old barn that has contaminated floors.  They'll park their tractors in these barns and let them arm up filling the entire barn full of smoke and soot, which has got to be coating the grain.  Heck sometimes the tractors and carts are parked on top of the grains.

I'm not sure how they clean this for consumption.  Is this typical for food grade grain storage?  Or is this only for grains that aren't food grade, like ethanol?

I've tried asking the youtube channels but never got any responses.

Go to the 3:40 mark and start watching for a good example.

Maybe you should stop researching now before you never want to eat again.

Just wash your bread and chips before eating, you’ll be fine.

Most of this goes to animal feed or ethanol. I'm not sure how end producers clean though. Soybeans do go to a fair bit of human consumption, but they usually get heavily processed. I work at a food processor, the cleaning process is shaking the grain over screens, but it gets processed a few more times before it actually gets to human consumption. I don't know that the seed retains much soot or anything though.

Grains stored the way you're describing are not for human consumption. Those are for ethanol and livestock feed.

Old barn?  Never seen that happen.  Here, most is in dedicated grain bins, which get swept clean every year to keep insects from living in them.  Also see airtight bags full of corn and wheat, last thing you want in them is mouse holes as the raccoons will come in for the mice and shred the bags.  Never seen corn or wheat stored in a building with equipment like the video.

Usually it's kept in bins. If farmers have a big yield its dumped on the ground.

Lots of critters make it into the grain; mice, elk, deer, birds etc. It's gross.

Grain is pretty dirty from the field, if you see a harvesting operation or dumping grain there's a huge amount of dust.

It's not common to store grain like in this video, normally it's stored in dedicated grain bins or there are big plastic shelter things now.

When grain is processed it gets washed so its not a big deal though.

OP should take a tour of some real farm grain silos, complete with pigeons eating up the grain and shitting everywhere...

In a building like that is not very common. The pressure from the grain can blow out the walls. Normally grain is stored in bins. Some guys use bags or on the ground temporarily during the winter if they run out of storage. You will get docked for dirty or moldy grain so it does pay to keep it clean and fresh.

This, like a huge pile 10 times bigger than a normal house them some kind of plastic over it.

This.... and I delt with #1 grains for food and human consumption and it’s still gross. Just trust the process by the time it gets to you it’s probably ok...

Yep our ground piles average 2 million bushel

Silos.

OP, think about it, why would you store loose grain on the ground? It would be a pain to remove eventually.

They have better systems.

Lol.

That’s a huge long arm excavator dwarfed in the middle of that pile of beans... damn loose grain all over the ground. City slickers that have no idea where food is made or how it’s processed. For reference from ground to peak is a hair over 90’ and it’s about 150’ wide and 500 yards long . It will hold a hair over 2 million bushel.

Attached File

An excellent video from an excellent YouTube’s:

Almost every combine we get into the shop has coon and rat shit all over the place plus rotten grain from last year.

Ethanol plants fall under "Food Grade" rules, since part of their production is Dried Distiller Grains used for livestock feed.
Food grade rules apply throughout the plants.

That doesn't stop rats or maggots though. Biggest rats I've ever seen have been in the older Ethanol plants. Woodchuck sized.

You aught to see how many grasshoppers go into wheat ben's if you think that's bad.

Like Rockt Racoon does ? Asking for a friend

OK wow.

Not a city slicker but I don't store or grow grain either.

I'm just glad that we taught rednecks how to wipe their asses.

LOL

That guy in the video is spending a million dollars to upgrade his bin site.

He doesn’t want to store grain that way, but it’s cheap and fills in when he needs it.  Like losing a bin this past summer to the midwest storms.

Now move on to Kate’s videos of the grasshoppers in the wheat bins...  

They just leave it laying on the ground sometimes.

Milo Terrain by FredMan, on Flickr

Pile O Milo by FredMan, on Flickr

Wait until OP discovers that they grow that stuff in DIRT!  I mean, how sanitary can THAT be?

All food comes from the dirt, both your food or your food's food.

Imagine the shipment of grain that continued to load on the barge when my friend lost a foot in the auger.  They drug him out stopped the bleeding, put him in the boo-boo wagon and kept right on loading the barge.  Foot, boot, and everything else that wasn't left attached to him down the river to somewhere.

Grain that is sold and shipped to other countries has a limit to how much dirt and crap is allowed to be in it.
If the grain they they load onto a ship is below that percentage allowed, they add more dirt.
As long as it adheres to the standards, it's legal, and makes more money for the company that buys from suppliers and sells to foreign governments.

butdidyoudie.gif

Why spend the extra money for "cleanliness" that has zero effect on the finished product?

Lots of soy goes to china. Serves them right to get contaminated shit sent their way once in a while.

You're telling me plants are grown in dirt?  Well holy shit.  Thanks for the education.  I wish I was as smart as you!  

Seriously though....

I thought it would have been obvious, but this is GD, so I guess I should have dumbed it down and explained that I was talking about the motor oil, fuel, hydraulic fluid, exhaust soot, pesticides, and God knows what else is on the floor of that barn.  I've seen grain get stored like this in a lot of videos (I tend to watch a lot of farming videos) and have always wondered.  And from what I can tell, farmers don't really care too much about it and hope that it somehow gets cleaned or diluted enough before it reaches our grocery shelves.

OP you really don't want to know.

I watch Cole The Cornstar all the time.  They swept and cleaned before they put corn in the barn.  And, yes, they have the walls secured to the floor on the inside so they don't blow out.

The farmer in that video does have some smaller grain bins and they do pay the co-op to store grain also. But whatever they can store in that machine shed saves them on storage fees so they fill it up first.

They empty the shed with an auger into a grain cart and then transfer it with another auger into a leg which fills there hopper bottom. When they need to fill trucks they use yet another auger under the hopper bottom for that. Horribly inefficient, that's one reason why they're upgrading their been site this year.

Like someone else said earlier, they're putting in a million-dollar bin set up sometime this year so they don't have to use the machine shed anymore. The oldest son does the book work for the farm and he says that what they spend on storage at the co-op every year is going to make the full payment on the new bin set up.

Oop!  Now your food gets an extra booger in it!

It does.

People are a lot more resilient than legal commercials and Reader's Digest articles would have you believe. India and China are excellent examples of how humans can thrive in pollution. Read about London in the 18th and 19th centuries...

Your average mechanic or industrial worker is consuming and absorbing more hydrocarbons daily than you probably get in a lifetime of eating the products you're concerned with.

You don't want to know what kind of chemicals go on grains stored in the elevators and bins around the country to keep the bugs at bay. The media hypes the dangers of Round Up but the insecticides are what scare me.

Its probably been on the ground and have dirt on it

Okay, you need some 'explaining'

First off - crops grow in the the dirt.

Second, at 3:40 what I saw was a clean concrete floor where a gravity wagon had a spill. That's not normal storage.  HOWEVER, there didn't appear to be any oil etc to be on that spot.  When I was growing up my dad would have had me sweep it up and put it back in the wagon.  The concrete floor is cleaner than the outside world.

Third - 'old barn with contaminated floors' ' they'll park their tractors in there' blah blah blah.  Nope.  It is a GRAINERY.  Most graineries store grain on the two sides and on the top level.  Back in the 1930s they didn't have as many options to keep air flowing through the grian so you had a maximum thickness. Also, force of the grain on the walls could be a limiting factor.  So you'd have a wide 'hollow' alleyway inbetween.  This also allowed you to pull through with a wagon and quickly flow grain into it from the top or sides (until it got quite empty. In the olden days this is when you'd switch from gravity to shovels, now, people use under-floor augers)

And then why let that space go to waste?  Most farmers would park equipment in that allyway

Also what are you talking about?  Contaminated floor?  Contaminated with what?  Grain? Yup.  Grain is contaminated with grain.

When whatever you are storing grain in gets almost empty, you crawl in with a pushbroom and grain shovel, sometimes even a whisk broom in your pocket.  You brush the grain out of every nook and cranny, and sweep it out to make sure it got in the wagon and got to town.

You did this for a couple reasons.  First, it's slightly more profit.  In an old school grainery you'd be able to get 100-200lbs more out, so probably $10 for 1 hour of labor.  Not a great win.  (But often this is what you'd make the kid do).  But mainly you were trying to empty it of grain so that it wouldn't rot, or carry an infection of fungus into the next lot you were going to store in there next season, etc etc.

You don’t like a little phosphine with your corn?