[celticninja]

I agree. The first paragraph of the article contains their reasoning behind creating it. An experienced farmer asked them to create something so that he (and his children) never had to expose themselves to that risk again. They know it is dangerous, they may manage that risk but you are a fool if you think they would prefer to run the risk rather than find a safer alternative.

[mustacheemperor]

There is a post on the front page of reddit[0] today about the risks of grain entrapment, and that thread is also full of people with firsthand experiences of friends or relatives dying on farms from it.

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/nwmect/til_t...

[Krasnol]

Interesting timing.

[exporectomy]

This thread is a hilarious game of "I'm better than you because I know real farmers". For some reason, certain occupations seem to bring out a sanctimonious attitude in people that nobody can understand it if they're not personally doing it themselves, combined with a failure to recognize that those occupationists are diverse and one person's personal friends might feel differently from another group or even the majority.

[baryphonic]

I must say, I find this response a bit odd. Just for reference, a billionaire US presidential candidate last year said[0]:

> I could teach anybody—even people in this room so no offense intended—to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.

I've seen this kind of attitude toward lower-status occupations from fellow engineers and other educated professional types, and I find it distasteful. Unlike some other occupations which also provoke a "sanctimonious attitude" (such as, say, education, despite almost all of us having extensive experience with it as a consumer or product or something), farming seems like a blind spot for almost all educated professionals. I know I'm profoundly ignorant of how all of the different types of food I eat are produced. Everything I learn about the field - and I'm not naturally interested in it - makes me feel even more uninformed about all of the factors that go into producing and distributing food. That indicates to me that farmers, whom we depend on, absolutely deserve some respect and deference. When a common sentiment among this class is that farming can be reduced to simply putting some dirt over a hole with a seed inside, knowing an actual farmer is probably pretty valuable, even if that farmer isn't representative of farmers as a whole. Farming seems to be one of the few occupations where this "sanctimonious attitude" seems justifiable.

[0]https://www.newsweek.com/mike-bloombergs-elitist-farming-com...

[celticninja]

It's not "I know..." It's "you are making stupid assumptions" and you haven't read the article.

[bombcar]

They’re already running the risk vs other safer alternatives - even if just smaller silos.

Sure if you give it away for free they’ll be there - but if you’re trying to sell it you need to convince them (or more likely get it illegal to not use one).