Bloody hell. Neighbor driving by called me up to suggest there might be an issue.
Thank dog for good neighbors.
City boy here, what am I looking at?
The thing that looks like a giant pencil tip holds grain, it drops grain onto the track (thin thing that goes up into the air beside it), which carries it up and drops it into a truck to be hauled away. If you don’t turn it off when you drive away it just keeps going, even though nothing is there to catch the grain. All the tan stuff on the ground is the grain that fell out while nothing was there to catch it.
That auger in the picture is what we use to put grain on the feed truck, but what went wrong was the auger that goes to the top of that bin from the mill just kept pumping the grain out the top when the bin was full and it fell off the top of the bin into those piles. About 4 tons or so.
Ah, that makes much more sense! I didn’t think to account for another out of sight 👍
Thanks for that, I am still confused because the grain isn't in a pile right near the end of the track. Does the track move in a circle or something?
wind I guess, as it's falling from a higher point it has time to fly a little beforehand
That was puzzling me too! I haven’t ever moved one myself but my understanding was it’s a bit of a pain to move the loader track, so I’m not sure how the grain ended up in that pattern. You’d think if the loader was still running it would only be in a pile at the end. But I’ve also never had to deal with a mess like this.
It’s a mill, they left it running
What is it milling?
About
stuff, and things
Mostly oats, some rye in it right now. We'd usually mix in barley but we have a bunch of rye since we started growing cover crops and the distillers around only take so much. So it goes in cows.
See general reply in post.
So there's an auger that goes up to the top of that hopper bin in the foreground and drops the milled grain in the bin. The actual mill is off to the left and out of the picture.
Left the mill running, got distracted, the bin filled up but there's no sensor to shut it off (yet) so it just kept pumping grain out and it all slid off the top of the bin and spilled on the ground. That was probably about 4 tons of oats on the ground.
There was a shovel party to clean it up.
Now my sides hurt from laughing so much at you.
The shear amount to shit your going to get for this one over the years. I would ask you "Is your mill running?" Everytime I saw you or called you for decades.
"Then you'd better catch it..."
Well, as far as mistakes go, this one was pretty minor, but I figured townies might find it funny. My expensive mistakes would be hard to capture in pictures, or they'd just make me cry.
Otherwise, we just aim for mistakes that don't kill us.
Damn, what a lovely way to spend a day. Even with a handful of fellow shovelers, that's 4 tons! That's a shit ton of tons!
It's oats so it's not that bad. It's a lot of volume for not much weight. Each shovel was pretty light and easy to move. Oats run around 32lbs/bushel. Oats are also pretty slick so it it doesn't take much force to push a shovel into them. This mess was more annoying than a serious issue.
It's not like wheat at 60lbs/bu. That same sized pile would be closer to 8 tons and take a while to pick up. Each shovel full would weigh more and then surface is rougher so it's harder to push a shovel into.
That's the standard weight for oats, but generally it actually runs 40 to 46 lbs/bu. The standard weight was built a long time ago before much of the modern seed varieties had been bred.
That said, you're right, it's still a lot lighter to shovel than something like wheat, and glorious compared to faba beans which is like shovelling gravel.
And you're right about the slickness, oats are almost a pleasure to shovel. But the dust is really irritating to the skin, at least to most people. It can be rough to deal with at harvest time.
Oh, most of it picked up with the loader bucket, but we did have to shovel out from too close to the bin to run the loader, and scrape around to get the rest without adding in gravel.
Lower your ISO, my man.
A daytime shot shouldn't be this grainy.
Hey dude, let it be. I couldn't do any better, of coarse not.
Was it windy? How did it end up behind the conveyor?
Trouble at mill.
Oh no, what kind of trouble?
I don't know! Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of ...
Nobody expects the [slightly delayed] Spanish Inquisition!
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