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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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”