MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 - And I don't think there's many of you that are just joining us, but Dr. Klein Ileleji is going to give us a second presentation, and his presentation is gonna be more on proactive stored grain management. Instead of monitoring more, how do we prevent problems up front? So Dr. Ileleji, we appreciate you joining us again for your second presentation. - Great. Again, good morning to everyone again. And I will be talking about proactive stored grain management, and this talk primarily is about being active or proactive in managing your grain, rather than being passive. Typically people feel grain in the bin is harvest already banked in the books and out of sight, out of mind. And once it's time to market, you just unload it and take it to sell. However, we know grain is a biologically active material and it's going to lose its value depending on the conditions of that environment in which it's stored. So the thesis here is how do we use some management principles to prevent that loss in value? There's some things I'll be talking about that I had presented previously; I'll just gloss over them. Hopefully I wouldn't lose anyone. I typically give a summary of what we had last year. So in the U.S., we brought in just over 15 billion bushels of corn, and just over 4.4 billion bushels of soybean. We know because of the war in Ukraine, there will be some definitely lack of supply from that region, which typically feeds into North Africa, and possibly more coming in from South American and the U.S. When you look at stored grain management, you have to look at it with the following lens in mind. Because we have seasonal patterns of weather, it is best to be conservative on moisture. So I always advocate go lower than higher. Typically if you go lower, say, in the fall, and you have a warm winter spell, then you're not in danger. If you go higher and you have a warm winter spell, then you're in trouble. Second point, invest in monitoring technologies and understand what your data means. I did talk about that in my first talk. Check your stored grain frequently, especially when it gets warm. Samantha did mention that in her talk, too. Should you smell deteriorating grain around the storage bins, investigate to determine active spoilage, remove spoiled grain from the bin, if possible, turn on aeration fans to slow down spoilage. Again, if you smell, but don't use smell as your monitoring means. Practice safe bin entry procedures. Number one, never work alone in a bin. For grain not dried sufficiently in the fall, cool as soon as possible, and dry when the weather becomes favorable. These are just some points I make early on about proactive stored grain management. So let's look at how much we'll dry. There's at least with several types of grain and oil seeds. We have shelled corn and sorghum. Typically we want to harvest about 30. People harvest lower than that; that's fine, but at least 30 max. And you can see the transition of how we release moisture depending on the length of storage time. So up to six months: 15%. And when you go into the summer months, past the summer, it goes to 13% and beyond one year. Soybean, the max, we say it's 18 at harvest. I mean, when you harvest. And up to six months, 13. For beyond the summer, 12% and beyond the year, you want to dry to 11. And looking at wheat, barley, and oats, max to harvest 20, and up to six months, 14%. And if you're gonna store beyond the summer, 13, and beyond the year, 12. I must add, and I think I mentioned in my first talk, that moisture content is the number one what I call number one strategy of proactively managing your stored grain. If you compromised on moisture early on, then it's gonna be very challenging to manage that stored grain in the bin. So it's very important to make sure you get the right moisture before you bin your grain, otherwise you're gonna be fighting the battle in managing that grain. So the other thing is you want to have good moisture content indicators, or measurement means. And one of the things I always tell people is make sure you check the calibration of your moisture meter. If you're a farmer, with your grain elevator. Typically grain elevators will recalibrate their systems, send it somewhere to recalibrate it. And if you're a farmer selling to an elevator, you wanna make sure your moisture content, the moisture meter, reads the same, or is in tune, calibrated close to your grain elevator's. You don't want to get a surprise when you get to the elevator and your moisture meter's reading something different and you get discounted. It's moisture calibration and understanding how to measure moisture content. For example, if your moisture meter does not have a moisture temperature correction, making sure that that grain equilibrates to room temperature before you measure it. Those are some things that you want to take note of. These are two moisture meters, the Dicky-John GAC-2500, and Perten AM that we use typically have done some work with respect to calibration. So now let's look at some basic concepts of stored grain management. One, grain is biologically-active material, and therefore it will always deteriorate under favorable conditions. Grain is not like coal. It will always deteriorate. Stored grain quality cannot be improved, but maintained. You're not taking No. 2 grain in a bin and convert that to No. 1 with management. So whatever you get is what you get, and whatever you get will tend to go down over time if you do not manage well. And number three, knowing the history and initial grain qualities are an important first step in managing grain in storage. What do I mean by that? You want to know the condition of that grain. Typically grain elevators will sample the grain coming into their facility, check for moisture, insect pests, check for broken kernel, for material, heating, and all that stuff. Why is that important? Tells them the condition of that grain. Do they need to fumigate it right away? Do they need to reject the grain because it's too infested? Are there hotspots that they need to cool the grain? You know, whatever the case may be. Not understanding the history and trying to manage grain, it becomes problematic, because you really don't understand what's going on. The other way I put it is, it's like a doctor not wanting to come into the examination room, not interviewing you to understand the history of what's happening before they begin to administer management of whatever, or prioritize whatever conditions you come with. So having that history is very important. And in management what that means is not just having the history in the head of the manager. Having a means to document that history. When I visit stored grain management in grain elevators on farms, I say, "You make sure you document it. "You write that down. "You write the conditions. "When you were loading the bin was it raining?" You know, all those small details. Those really help in deciding how you're gonna manage that grain moving forward. When you think of grain bin, what do you see? I didn't mention your investment. Well, it's not just corn or soybean, but it's cash in the bank. And the way you want to approach your stored grain management proactively is to look at that grain as cash in the bank. You're trying to manage value. You're trying to manage a financial worth, and not just grain. And if you have that approach that you're managing some value, then your whole mindset in management changes rather than just managing some commodity corn, or soybean. Grain is a stored grain ecosystem. And that ecosystem is manmade with a lot of pressures. For example, temperature; the grain moisture; relative humidity; gases, CO2, oxygen; the solar radiation; precipitation, or what you call rainfall; whatever physical, chemical, or biological controls you use to manage that grain, molds and mycotoxins; contaminants of insects, like frass, feces; contaminants of biological, living things like insects, mites, rodents, and birds; and any other plant material. All these are external pressures that affect your stored grain ecosystem, and the role of a good manager is understanding what these pressures do to grain quality, or grain going out of condition, and how to manage these external pressures. I have mentioned storage life of grain. This is an understanding of how the life of grain with respect to losing commercial grade is affected by primarily two things: moisture content and temperature. And essentially these two conditions are things that you can measure in your grain bin, which, you know, typically you sample for moisture and you can easily measure the temperature with cables in your grain bin. And understanding those two helps you to understand the risks and how long your the grain can sit under certain conditions before it loses dry matter in commercial grain. And for those who were not here, just to explain this table, the first row is corn moisture content. The second row is soybean moisture content. And the first column is temperature, grain temperature. In this highlighted region I just have those numbers highlighted so I can explain the table. If you keep corn at 15% moisture content, and at 60 Fahrenheit, you can hold it for 9.2 months after which it's going to lose grade by one. So if it's U.S. No. 1, after 9.2 months, it's going to lose grade to U.S. No. 2. If it's U.S. No. 2, after 9.2 months, it's gonna lose grade to U.S. No. 3, and so on and so forth. The second row of moistures that applies to soybean, and as I explained for corn, the same applies for soybean. In general terms, as you increase your moisture content, either soybean or corn, or you increase temperature, as you will expect, those two conditions are not great for grain storage, your storage life shortens. So the goal is to try to keep your grain temperatures low, as much as possible. And you do that starting in the fall when you're approaching cold winter temperatures. And you want to try to hold those temperatures for as long as possible, knowing any time you increase that temperature, you are going to be shortening your storage life. Conversely, you want to also dry appropriately knowing any time your grain is above your threshold moisture, 15 for corn, or 13 for soybean, you are going to be reducing the storage life of that grain. I'll go into four methods that were were developed at Purdue University by Drs. Maier, Mason, and Woloshuk on principles in managing stored grain. These are very good principles to use. If implemented correctly, they actually prevent a lot of things, like unloading problems, mold issues, and the like. The method is put into an acronym, SLAM. Now, we in the basketball period, so, you know slam dunk, and just quickly, sanitation for S; loading, L; A, aeration; and M, monitoring. Now I'll just go all through these. These aspects of SLAM have been mentioned in the talk by Samantha. So first action line of defense: sanitation. When you think of sanitation in the stored grain facility, you want to think of insect clean, not human clean. Remember, it doesn't take a lot a lot of kernels of grain to keep an insect satisfied. So when you think of how clean should be the facility? Well, let no kernel be left behind, meaning sweep every single kernel around the facility, grain dusts, or anything that provides insects with a feeding environment, for them to harborage and stay. Especially you want to clean up your facility by sweeping, vacuum it clean. You want to open the aeration channels, or false floors, if you have a full bin, once in a while, and vacuum out all the fines that accumulate. If you don't, these are harborage for insects. They're going to live there with multiple generations and essentially will feed into your bin. You want to use empty bin treatments internally inside a facility and outside a facility, up to six foot of bin wall. These internal bin treatments such as Tempo and Malathion are certified for empty bin treatments in grain bins. For organic grain, I have heard that the diatomaceous earth, DE, is also a good product for empty bin treatment of bins used to store organic grain. Again, these products are not to be used on the grain itself. You have to have that label "empty bin treatment." So we've done sanitation, and it's all about cleaning. It's all also about removing shrubs around the facility to prevent the rodents from hiding, or any forms of insects of that type. I mean, animals of that type. And the second, the SLAM acronym, L is loading. In loading, we're trying to eliminate or remove fines and foreign material. We're trying to ensure that grain is properly dried by using not excessive temperatures to prevent stress cracks, Stress cracks will cause breakage, shattering of that grain and produce production of fines that will increase the fine loads. You want to use appropriate handling equipment, also, to prevent breakage. If possible, you want to pre-clean, but before even pre clean, it starts from setting your combine correctly, making sure that the combine's set correctly to prevent any breakage. You want to use the right handling equipment. In this case, for the transition into the bin, we have this device called cushion boxes, or in this vertical system, flow retarders, that essentially cushion that grain, or retards the velocity at which that grain travels, or prevents that grain from hitting grain metal. In this case, you have a collection of grain, so it's grain-on-grain to preventing shattering. Now I wanna tell you a brief story. This event occurred outside my colleague's office in Princeton, Kentucky. And like I mentioned in my first talk, the occurrence of a entrapment event is due to a series of things not done that causes that event. And in this case, a series of things not done that led the farmer to go into the bin to try to break up a situation to enable the grain flow and unfortunately got stuck. So one of the things that was not done was the center was not cored, so you had a lot of fines, and obviously heavy condensation that over time compacted, and when the farmer was trying to unload that bin, he didn't get flow at a certain point. He decided to go in, and unfortunately got stuck. Luckily, he didn't have the unloading auger turned on, and so he survived this scenario. But look at what they had to do. The firefighters had to come, they had to cut the sides of the bin to enable grain flow out of the sides to release some pressure. And eventually, when some of that grain came out, you can see the big, almost looking like a stalagmite, compacted grain. But what caused this? This didn't happen like overnight. This happened over time. And so you want to ensure that you do all these small things right from getting your moisture right, drying adequately, cooling adequately, coring the bin of fines, and setting your combines even before you harvest. All of the small things that can prevent this event. What does fines do in loading? If your grain is loaded with a lot of fines, the granular grain mechanics, or flow, will concentrate all those fines at the center. Because fines have more surface area, it will compact more. If you look at typically the spout is there, the downspout is there. At night where you have condensation under the downspout it's gonna flow from within the spout, down through the center. A lot of the insects like warm environment. They're gonna move from the bin to the center as the cold encroaches during the winter. And all that will create a center that is heavy with fines. Remember, fines are broken corn so they easily get moldy because you've exposed the grain itself to the floury endosperm, or the starch material, and mold easily will begin to grow on fines. So essentially, with more fines, you provide an environment conducive for more growth, conducive to enable insects to come into harborage, and secondary insects that feed on fines, and insects that feed on whole kernels, the mold feeders, all that stuff. This essentially is ripe for great micro biological activity, and obviously hotspot. Removing the fines prevents that, and also facilitates airflow. So that's what reducing and coring fines does. It's advisable to core what we call successive coring or withdrawal with successive fillings. It means after feeling like two, three rings, you pull out the center, fill two, three rings, or even four, you pull out the center, rather than just feeling the whole grain and then pulling out the center. So essentially as you fill that bin, you're ensuring you have a valley gradually as you pull the center and pull out the fines. There are various grain spreaders that are not too expensive that farmers have innovated. These are two different ones I'm showing here, essentially ones that this is hung in the entry spout, and as grain flows and bounces off this inverted cone, it spreads that grain, and sort of spreads the fines around, preventing it from accumulating at the center. So we've done now, two things: sanitation, loading, and we're going to the third aspect of SLAM, which is aeration. Aeration slows down biological activity. In aeration what you're trying to do is essentially cool that grain. In aeration you're trying to ensure you have adequate air flow through that grain. You wanna move massive amounts of air through that grain. Typically, we say one CFM per bushel is advisable, but at least try to get 0.2 CFM per bushel. Aeration is great in our part of the world because after harvest, you have great weather. It's naturally cold. You don't have to have a chiller, and you wanna cool that grain as cool as possible. Typically, we advise successive culling, which I'll show subsequently. Aeration does affect certain things. One, biological activity is limited with respect to mold growth. You're retarding any form of mold growth with aeration. You're also retarding insect growth. If you look at the table I have, the first column is temperature, and the second is effects on insect. So if you have greater than 122 Fahrenheit, death in minutes, I'm talking of insects. So if you have excessive high temperatures, you're killing insects. But if you have temperatures within 95-plus to like 77, these are sub-optimum to optimum temperatures for insect development. Now, if you're going to below 60, now you're talking of even the possibility of killing insects. So you want to cool your grain during the fall with the intent of eliminating your insect pests. I just wanna show you the importance of aeration. This is a trial in a small bin. We had a 55-gallon bin. We're doing some micro-sized grain experiment. And we had grain at 24.6%, higher than what we we wanted. And we decided to aerate to 12.6. But I just wanna show you the CO2 levels. The CO2 level is the blue line. We have actually the blue and red. So these are the bottom. So we started aerating. So the aeration panels turn on. And you can see as the grain was being aerated, of course, CO2's being removed, and gradually drying out that grain. You can see the levels are in the below 8,000. And for some reason, at this point, the fan stopped, and you can see how the CO2 levels jacked up when aeration stopped. So when aeration stopped, the molds took off and started growing, and you can see the rise in CO2 because of that growth. And once aeration came back on, they went back to normal. So aeration is one means of essentially retarding growth of mold, especially if you see something happening in your bin it's gonna slow down spoilage. So how do we aerate? Well, we suggest a three stepwise process to cool grain from the fall into the spring. First, you want to cool it down to this will be, I'm looking at here in October, you want to cool down to 50, 40, at least below 50, early in the fall. And as the temperatures go down in December, you only go down to as much as 20, 25. People ask me, "Well, are you gonna hurt the grain "if you freeze it?" No, you're not gonna hurt the grain if you freeze it. If you've dried it adequately, and you freeze it, you're not gonna hurt the grain. What you're gonna do is to kill your insects and eliminate the possibility of any more growth, at least during that period. So these are the three phases: fall cool down. By December you want to get to 28 to 35 Fahrenheit. Again, remember we've been having all kinds of weather. The earlier the better as you do this fall cool down. Now in the winter maintenance, what you want to do is to hold that temperature between 28 to 35. As the spring, we're coming into the spring, it's warming up, don't warm up that grain. Grain's a very good insulator. You want to seal your fans. And the only way you want to control moisture is to ventilate the headspace intermittently, particularly at night, to have a good exchange of air. As much as possible, you want to hold that cool temperature into the summer. It's not gonna hurt that grain at all. You want to hold the temperature into the summer. Now, I got a call from a farmer recently about doing this practice like I said, and they were having like high temperatures. I mean, the farmer said he measured in low number of moisture content, say 12.5, for example. And then after he unloaded the bin and he measured it again, and he found out the grain was like at 15% or 16%. And the question the farmer was asking me was because he was unloading cold grain and was going to deliver cold grain, did he pick up moisture? Because he's bringing very chilled grain into warm air. And of course, if you know the physics of it, if you have cold grain coming into warm air, the warm air will condense moisture on that grain, bringing the temperature to dew point around it and condensed moisture. I don't think, and I'm still going to investigate this, but I don't think grain will pick up moisture that fast and increase your moisture content to like three percentage points. I don't think so. Grain picking moisture up from the air is a long process. You know, if you do the moisture assumption, I should turn tests. If you've done those studies before. I mean, those studies take time. I mean, days for you to actually get any significant change in moisture content. If you're going to use aeration to change moisture in your grain bin, it takes days to do that. So just during the hours of loading, I don't believe that you're picking up a lot of moisture to cause significant change. However, I think it has to do with you not enabling that grain to equilibrate with room temperature, especially if you don't have a moisture meter that has a temperature correction factor. But I don't think it's going to hurt. Why do we recommend this? We've done extensive studies. I did the studies that showed that if you have that grain be warm early in the spring, you start seeing your problems early in the spring. I mean insect problems. For example, if you start warming up the grain to this temperatures, we get into 60's, 70's, by the time you get to May, you're already having huge insect issues. If you hold that grain as cool as possible, you are pushing your potential insect problems further into the summer. You don't want to start trying to fumigate or have insect issues early in the summer, So that what you do? In terms of holding that grain cold, you want to cover your fans. It's important to cover your fans. Why is that? These fans will freely spin, due to the air flow around them, and gradually will pull in the warm air. Remember the plenum has a lot of harborage of insect pests. You're just bringing them out of hibernation early. You're just waking them up early. So rather than that place being cold and they remain in hibernation for those of them who are alive, you're just warming up the whole place and enabling them to begin reproduction early. So you want to cover that fan, prevent any wheeling, and pulling in warm air. The other thing you want to do is headspace. You want to ventilate the headspace. And what that ventilation means is you are exchanging only the air in the headspace. What happens is that there's an interchange of moisture from the surface of the grain when it headspace air. Explain it. During the daytime, you have essentially a huge temperature load in that headspace. You have all this galvanized steel roof. You have the headspace side walls. Typically you'll find out that the temperature in the headspace is sometimes 10 degrees higher, or even 15 degrees higher, than the temperature of the grain. Actually, the temperature of the ambient is really very hot. If you've climbed in a bin in a sunny day, you're coming out soaking sweat. What happens is that a hot temperature will evaporate moisture from the surface of the grain. So over time during the day, you're saturating the headspace with moisture. So by the time you get to night, you're having a highly-saturated headspace air. At night the temperatures cool down, the surface of the bin roof, all that wall, all that is cold. Now we have saturated air with cold surfaces around it. That moisture will condense on the surface, and that condensate, some of it will go up the spouts and drip down back to the center, causing more problems. Some of it will roll down the side walls and drip down onto the side walls causing problems. The way to eliminate that is not to warm up the whole grain by air, reaching the whole grain, but if possible, if you have what they call a roof exhaust, you just turn on that exhaust. Typically on timers, you turn into circulate to turn over that air, essentially pulling out the humid air that was accumulated during the daytime and exchanging that air with fresh, less humid air. That way you're going to control the condensation problems. It's the condensation problems that causes crusting, the common crusting we see on the surface of grain bins, which is a problem. If you partially unload the bin, you could have a empty spot that could be an entrapment case. That's what happens. That's how that occurs. I know the large companies don't sell exhaust for smaller bins, but for the large bins, exhausts are becoming a common device. But that's how you control it. Again, you don't want to warm up the whole grain bin, you just want to exchange the air in the headspace. The last point is monitoring, and monitoring we exhaustively covered that in the first talk. Essentially, you cannot manage what you don't know is there. The only way you're gonna manage your stored grain is to monitor what is there, and to manage from the point of information. There are various types of monitoring systems. I don't give recommendations on this is what to use, or this is what not to use. I have certain systems I have on my slides. These are systems I'm either using, or have interaction with companies, or I know more about because of my use. But I'm not endorsing any company. There are a lot of great systems out there. I encourage you to look into the "Grain Journal," one of those great magazines, or even do a Google search. There are a lot of new, innovative companies coming out. There are pros, are cons, and cons of their systems, but most of them commonly will monitor temperature, will monitor relative humidity, will monitor CO2. These are the three commons. CO2 used to not be monitored. It was actually partly due to a study that I was engaged in with Dr. Maier at Purdue that made in situ CO2 monitoring popular. But I'm just presenting one system called by Centaur Ag, and they have all kinds of intelligence in various systems, which I encourage you to look into. I want to just tell you something about monitoring with respect to differences between temperature and CO2. In temperature, you're actually measuring the temperature of the grain within a radius of probably half a foot, or a foot, max. So obviously, gauging the amount of cables to have is important. Also, you're lucky if your hotspot is within your cable. So if you're using a cable system, and your hotspot is, say, ways away from your cable, you're not gonna pick it up. This is my actually pilot silo, and you can see it's just happened that my hotspot is within my cable. And actually, if you see this metal here, I actually lost the probe trying to probe through this hotspot. Hotspots are really packed. It's hard to reach. And it's interesting that the cable on this side did not even pick up this temperature. So in temperature monitoring there's still, in my mind, room for intelligence, especially when your temperature cables are away from the location of the hotspot. CO2 monitors are very good for detecting spoilage, especially early warning for spoilage. One, CO2 is a gas. It will diffuse out of the spoilage zone and up to wherever you have your sensor. I talked about the (indistinct) system, very easy to use. This picture is actually of me like 20 years ago, or something like that, when we initially looking at trying out, exploring, monitoring piles, grain piles, trying to see if we can use a portable sensor to monitor the exhaust of the fan, the fan exhaust that holds on the tarp of a pile, and see if we can use that as an indicator of early warning. And it does work, but with CO2 the challenge is, like I mentioned in my last slide, is what is the value? If you have typically 450 is environmental background CO2 level, so if you have like 500, we know nothing is happening, 500 PPM. So what's the difference between if you get up to 1000? Below 1000, well, nothing much is happening, right? But if you got to over 1000, yeah, something is obviously going on. But the question becomes how big is the problem? Does it necessitate I turn the grain over? Does it necessitate I sell it? And some of these decisions require some big things to do, like turning that grain over. You might have other things to be doing. Selling it might require you to bring a hundred car. Those are big decisions that I have found out. Some of the systems don't give what I call good enough data to enable the managers make these big decisions. And some of them just sit on the problem, and then the problem exacerbates, and becomes a huge problem, and causes total loss. But nevertheless, whatever system is out there, we have data, and this data points to something going on. And the question is you managers needs to make action. They need to take action. And like you mentioned in my first talk, all the systems that I saw total loss, they knew something was going on, just that they did not know how big it was. In summarizing, we want to monitor stored grain through all the season. You want to increase frequency, especially when you have warm weather. Once that grain has been cooled below 30, you want to hold it as much as possible. And the only time you aerate is when you think deterioration is occurring. By the way, deterioration can occur in the winter. That's another talk. Don't warm up grain in the spring after winter aeration. You wanna cover your fans to prevent warm air from ingressing into the plenum. We revised a "Grain Drying, Handling, and Storage Handbook, "The Midwest Plan Service-13." I was part of the team of faculty from various land grants that revised it. And there's a website to, if you want access. It's a great handbook for grain storage and handling. These are a number of resources at Purdue. We are trying to revise our resources online. Currently, I will be the first one to tell you our resources are not updated. So, but Iowa State has very updated information. I'll take questions. Thank you. - Klein, thank you very much. Excellent presentation and really good information. And like you say on your title, kind of proactive, preventative measures, which is the really the key place to start. We do have some questions, Klein. Some of 'em are quite detailed. I'll do my best to read them to you, and the first one does talk about kind of that proactive step. It's like an elevator. And if you're going to try to manage grain, but you don't understand the initial grain history coming into the elevator, what's the best starting place? What's the best way to sample? How do they get a really good idea of the quality of the grain coming into an elevator so that they can manage it? - Okay, very good question. That a very excellent question. So grain comes into the elevator, you don't have a good understanding of the history. So the first step in line of defense is good quality sampling. So make sure you sample that truck adequately. And typically a lot of elevators will have the probes, the automatic probes, the boom probes that you use to collect grain. Make sure you sample from each of those bulkheads and the truck bring in the sample, make sure you run your standards for bulk, density, moisture content. Make sure you smell if you have an odor to the grain, that'll give you a sense of if there was some deterioration occurring. Whatever you smell might not be bad. There might not be any deterioration, but typically grain will pick up odor from around it. So it gives you an idea of what's going on in the bin from which that grain came. Make sure you look for any signs of clumps and things like that. And that will give you a basic understanding of what that grain, the conditions that that grain came from and based on that, you can decide how to store it. A big advice is when you suspect grain has been abused, or not managed well, so it's not smelling fresh, or has some odor on it, or you have the moisture a little bit high, don't mix it with good grain. You always have it planned to segregate your grain based on what you're getting. Because anytime you mix wet grain, or poor handled grain, or poor conditioned grain with the best grain, all you've done is, you've just essentially spiked, or inculcated another dimension of complexity in your bin that you could have easily managed. - Excellent answer, and it actually gets kind of right to the person's second question is they were talking about quality, and mixing low and high quality, and diluting, and poor quality grain with high quality grain just to meet the grain standards. And it sounds like you're really cautiously recommending against that. - I'm recommend against that, though I will say that a common practice in the industry. I don't want anyone to shoot at me. Don't quote me. So this where it's going to be, for some it's good, for some it's bad. So if you're a grain elevator, a lot of great elevators will take grain, irrespective of the quality, really. They'll take it from the farmer. They'll buy poor quality grain, discounted, poor quality grain. They'll buy great, good quality grain, right? But when you bring that grain into the facility, you don't want to be mixing the good-quality grain you're buying with a poor-quality grain and store it in the bin. When you want to mix it is when you want to sell it. That's where you're taking your U.S. No. 1, and your market is calling out for U.S. No. 2. You're taking some poor quality U.S. No. 3 or 4, I hate to say sample, in some cases, and you blend your U.S. No. 1 to get your No. 2. So you're blending at the outbound. Now, that's not typically too great for the person buying, but typically those blends do not contain large quantities of these poor-quality grain, to be honest. You're talking of less than 1% if you look at the grade. And so a lot of these companies, processing companies, they screen those things out. And a lot of them turn over grain so fast that it wouldn't stay in the bin and cause any problem. But if you're a merchandiser going to hold grain for a long time, you don't want to hold blended poor and good quality for a long time. You're essentially gonna have a tough problem managing that. - Really good distinction of when it's appropriate, when it's not appropriate, and from a management standpoint. Seems like there's, okay, there's another couple questions here. This is a good one that everyone might be interested in. So what is growing in a hot spot in the bin? Is it toxic or harmless to ingest for humans? What exactly is a hotspot? Is it a mold culture, a colony? And is it infested with a particular pest? - Oh, very good. That's a excellent question. A hotspot is a, as the name suggests, is a growing hotspot due to biological activity, primarily caused by two things. It's either a mold-induced hotspot, or an insect-induced hotspot. A mold-induced hotspot will be due to moisture in some form getting into that grain with elevated moisture content, causing that grain to begin to mold. So mold, fungi are growing on that grain. And as you see the questions of starch, mold grown onto starch, you have a lot of CO2 being generated, as well as heat. As that mold grows, it essentially compacts with all the spores. The heat generated causes elevated temperature. That's why we call it a hotspot. And that temperature can even go beyond 70 degrees Celsius. Literally, if you put your hand in the spot, it's hot, it's gonna burn you. It's like quite hot. And that's why it's called a hotspot. If it's an insect-induced hotspot, where you have an agglomeration of a lot of insects, thousands of them, of course CO2 is gonna be generated because there are thousands, they're respiring, heat will be generated. And again, it's an insect-induced hotspot. Typically molding-induced hotspots and insect-induced hotspots, typically, so insect-induced hotspots will have molding occurring 'cause they're feeding on the grain. They're feeding, they're respiring, they're generating moisture, and it's causing that grain to also mold. So they are not, from insect-induced, I say insect, it starts from insects, but then molds begin to grow. A hotspot can lead to combustion. So what happens is the molding, it will start with a biologically-induced mold hotspot, and that becomes anaerobic. So when you have high concentration of CO2, oxygen is stat, and it becomes into chemical, you have the anaerobic reactions occurring, then once you get elevated temperatures the chemistry goes into smoldering, and that smoldering will take place in the absence of oxygen. All what will happen will be burning, but in the absence of oxygen. If you introduce oxygen when it's really hot, like aerate that bin when it's really hot, it's like fanning the flame. You're gonna start combustion and essentially you're gonna get a bin to catch fire. And so typically when you've got to the smoldering side of things, when if the bin starts, the grain starts to smolder, you can't aerate. What you need to do is now pump in dry ice or liquid nitrogen, which are coolants, to cool down that bin. And at that point, that bin is like coal. Like the picture I showed you, it's rock hard, like coal. You can't even recognize it was grain. And at that point, you're trying to salvage the bin and prevent an explosion. But you don't wanna get to that point. - Very good. Very good description and management tips. This is a new question. It's what's the best way to manage vomitoxins from worsening in food-grade grain? - Very good. Vomitoxin, if I understand that, which comes from scab, right? And it's, I believe it's more like if a field, it starts from the field rather than from the grain bin. The grain-induced molds, like the Aspergillus flavus, glaucus, and parasiticus are the ones that, Aspergillus flavus and parasiticus are the ones that produce the aflatoxin. And these are typically molding these. Vomitoxin, I believe, is from the, is this cabin width? I'm not exactly sure. But my understanding is it's it starts from the field, and it can proliferate, it can get bad in storage. And I guess the way to prevent it from getting bad in storage is one, to try as much as possible to reduce the temperatures and keep that grain as dry as possible. So you're bringing in molds that produce vomitoxin. And what you're trying to do is to keep that mold from growing in storage, and the only two ways you can do that is make sure the grain is adequately dried, and make sure that that grain is cooled. - Very good. Very good. Klein, there's just one last question, and again, I'm gonna paraphrase 'cause it's quite lengthy, but in the time of the year that we're in right now and we've got our grain mass cooled. If we go without any kind of electricity for an extended period of time due to some type of a cyber attack, or something like that, our grain is pretty safe, isn't it? At this point in the season, all we have to do is maybe do the headspace ventilation? - Yeah, and when you say at this point in the season, we're talking of now, right? - Yes, currently. - Just current, yeah, it's pretty safe. So right now our grain is pretty safe. It's gonna be getting warm very soon in terms of extended period of 70-degree days as we go into the spring. And the opportunity to make use of that cold grain will slowly decrease because as it gets warmer that warmth goes into the bin. So yeah, right now we're safe. I want to also do this caution for anyone who has grain out there. I recently wrote an article, I think a week ago I sent it out, and I said, the check you need to do right now is to go into your bin to ensure that you don't have any any active spoilage. Why can active spoilage be in the bin coming off the winter? Some places like Michigan actually had snow not too long ago. I think a week ago. Sometimes this snow would drift into the bin through the eaves, and when it warms up, that snow melts and seeps into the grain. So even though it's cold, if you're having melted snow seep in, you're increasing moisture without knowing it. And because you have that headspace warming up so drastically, it will tend to get that increased moisture of your grain within the first six inches to want to begin to mold. So right now, do a check of your bin. Check the periphery of the bin to make sure you don't have molding or discoloration. The way to see grain might be molding below, you'll see the kernels are a little bit discolorated, typically black. That's when you know molding is occurring. I have seen active molding in the winter, and once it starts, it's difficult to stop because mold is self heat-generating, and it will generate heat within itself to begin to expand. So do that check. Make sure you do that check. You don't have a problem. - Very good. Very good. Klein, thanks again for two excellent presentations.