Telescoping grain bin looking to assist farmers working on rented, temporary fields

Aug 12, 2022

Grain bins are often the biggest piece of the puzzle when it comes to figuring out a farm's logistics, as they're usually the only place to store vast quantities of granular goods such as seeds and fertilizer.

Though since they're so costly, and not very easy to move, there can be vast tracks of land that have nowhere to put any finished crop.

One new solution featured at Ag In Motion earlier this summer was a new type of bin that would solve this exact problem.

The Telescoping Grain Bin, or T-Bin for short, would start out being 17 feet tall and 23 feet wide while being able to hold up to 10,000 bushels.

Co-founder Pat Beaujot says that the bin is for those farmers who need to work on distant lands for a suitable alternative to grain bags.

"Farmers are using grain bags right now to handle their more distant farms and rented land and what not, and this would give them an alternative to the grain bag because they could put a bin yard of these in - and they could even have aeration in them and everything else. If they lose the land, they don't have to give up those bins, they can move them somewhere else."

They can also help to give farmers piece of mind to focus on a type of crop, without worrying too much about the volume necessary to store it.

"If they grow a high-volume crop one year in that land," said Beaujot, "They'd need more bins and then they might grow a low volume like flax and move some of the bins to the other bin yards. These larger farmers are pretty spread out, and that's not changing so we felt that these portable bins could really help them."

Price so far isn't set in stone, thanks to supply chain troubles impacting the price of materials.

"It's going to be in that 150,000 range for a 10,000-bushel bin," said Beaujot, "But we really haven't nailed all that down yet with all of the changes in steel prices and everything else. That's a rough idea."

There's also a moving kit that's separate from the bin, and Beaujot says that it takes around an hour to set up and take down the bin.

The T-bin is currently searching for a manufacturing site, with Beaujot saying they'll likely be able to build a few to test them out this fall.

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