Every year, grain bin entrapments put workers in some of the most dangerous conditions in agriculture. It’s the problem Grain Weevil was built to solve, and it’s exactly what our CEO and co-founder Chad Johnson dug into with Steven Kilger on the Feed & Grain Podcast.
If you’ve got 30 minutes on your next drive between bins, it’s worth the listen. Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear.
How a father-son project became a safety movement
Chad walks through how Grain Weevil actually started: a father-and-son build that caught the attention of a local farmer, who basically dared them to make it work for real. That challenge turned into a summer of development in 2019, and by March 2020, the first auger-based prototype was running. Not a bad turnaround for an idea that started in a garage.
That auger-based design is the detail worth pausing on. Chad compares the robot to a tank, except instead of treads, it moves on two augers. That’s what lets it get traction in grain the way nothing else on the market does, and it’s the foundation for everything the robot does once it’s inside a bin.
What the robot is actually doing in there
This is the part that matters most for anyone who’s had to send a person into a bin with a rope and a prayer: the robot levels grain, breaks up crusts and bridges, and can act as a spreader during filling, all while keeping grain quality up and every single boot outside the bin. That last part isn’t a slogan for us. It’s the whole point.
Chad doesn’t skip over how hard that engineering problem actually is, either. Grain behaves like a fluid one minute and a solid the next. Add in dust, temperature swings, and the kind of environment that chews up typical robotics, and you’ve got a problem that doesn’t have an off-the-shelf solution. Building something that survives in that world, reliably, season after season, is a different kind of hard than most robotics work.
Where things stand right now
As of this conversation, the team is deep in pre-production and working through hazardous location certification so the robot is ready for commercial facilities, alongside on-farm trials and continued work on more autonomous capability. It’s the unglamorous, essential stage between “it works” and “it’s ready for your operation,” and Chad is candid about what that stage actually involves.
Why this conversation is worth your time
Steven asks the questions you’d actually want answered, not just the highlight-reel ones, and Chad’s answers make it clear this isn’t a pitch, it’s a group of people who got tired of watching entrapments happen and decided to build their way out of it.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on the Feed & Grain Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Want to see the robot that’s behind the conversation? Buy Now and keep the boots out of your bins this season.