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Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Feed Mill Safety: Check These On Your Next Safety Inspection
A good part of our career has been spent in ag-business/agribusiness operations, with a huge part of them being at feed mills- for both day and night shifts. This episode covers a few big ticket items that we routinely see. This list can help raise a red flag that there may be some significant risk that can lead to an injury on the horizon. We hope this helps!
Summary
In this episode of Safe, Efficient, Profitable, Joe and Jen break down mill safety risks. Core themes and topics discussed: housekeeping & dust control, bin cleanouts and confined space, alone-worker protocols & site security, auger/elevator hazards, and lockout/tagout realities. They emphasize seasonality (winter/ice, summer humidity, harvest chaos), contractor scheduling, and how documentation (permits) exposes program gaps.
Action Checklist (use on your next mill walkthrough)
Verify dust/housekeeping program- anything requiring contractors, coordinate to manage seasons & contractor/part lead times.
Spot-check bearings/heat and guard integrity at augers, hammer mills, headhouses etc
Review the last 5 confined space permits —do training, equipment, and rescue plans line up? If not, give us a call! www.allen-safety.com
Evaluate alone worker processes, check site security (fences, locks, access points near rail lines) and work in a plan to tighten things down where you're able.
Walk equipment that routinely must be cleaned out, troubleshooting is required, jams, etc and validate LOTO is correct- where to apply the lock, how and who is checking for power.
Safety Training and Training-Style Floor-Based Safety Audits/Evals: Allen-Safety.com
Online safety training: AllenSafetyCoaching.com
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SEO Keywords:
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confined space in mills
auger safety
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housekeeping dust control
Secondary (long-tail / intent-rich):
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bin cleanout confined space rescue plan
rural mill security and lone-worker policy
elevator leg maintenance and guarding checks
MCC room lockout tagout without local disconnect
receiving pit confined space classification
seasonal mill safety winter ice and harvest
bearing heat monitoring in mills
dust program
hammer mills
augers
feed mill safety checklist
safety for small crews
This video is intended for educational purposes. Solutions offered are not designed to take the place of an attorney or medical professional, and should not be taken as legal or medical advice. It is recommended that viewers consult a safety consultant, medical provider or an occupational safety legal team as applicable to help navigate their specific circumstances.
For educational purposes, videos may show the inside of manufacturing facilities, including meat and poultry production facilities, commercial farming, feed milling, and petrochemical facilities. Images shown may depict individual lines and show trained employees working in their daily jobs, however these visuals may not be suitable for all audiences. Specific job tasks shown are being completed by trained professionals, and should not be attempted without proper training and equipment under the supervision of a professional. Viewer discretion is advised.
Today's topic op mill safety issues. Okay, you know anything about mills.
Speaker 2:Do actually Well, so do.
Speaker 1:I, so this ought to be a great topic.
Speaker 2:I actually got a mill VPP once.
Speaker 1:Anyway, a long time ago, here we go. Welcome back to our channel. Today we're doing op mill safety issues. Okay, we have a lot of mills across the country. We do. We've got a lot of locations that have mills, complexes where they have plants, farms, the mill attached.
Speaker 2:I kind of like this one, because a lot of times it's hard to get folks out to the physical mill itself to support them and they may only have like five people that work there. That's what I mean. So, whether it's a third party or it's just not in the budget, sometimes it's hard to get a little bit of extra help out there.
Speaker 1:We do all this here and there's the mill in the background, so all right. So the first one's going to be is housekeeping.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know everyone's like well, that's pretty easy. Why would you have it? Because it's still a problem. It's the cleaning routine, it's the cleaning cycle. It's winter, with labor and turnover and elevated work issues, the housekeeping becomes a challenge.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that that's a great point. So, even if we are not having to keep things in an explosion proof manner, so we're not having to deal with certain seals and class two div three things, I think that it's important to really be realistic about when we have shortened labor and we've got some other things going on. So people, we all know it's winter, everybody's sick, everybody's kids are sick. Now we're short even more. Staying on top of some of that daily stuff when you're trying to keep up with orders Absolutely Trucks waiting and they're backing up now and we're trying to go it does get to be a challenge. I know that there's a lot of locations that have been battling ice issues, so you've got most of your mills in rural areas besides.
Speaker 1:So now that's where they're at or you get harvest season, they're backed up, yeah.
Speaker 2:Everything's kind of thrown into chaos with everything. So, yeah, I mean housekeeping takes a back seat because we've got all these other more pressing issues. But just because you don't need to maintain things in an explosion-proof type environment, you should still have a dust program, you should still have a housekeeping program, because you never know when that buildup of dust, one auger or one hammer mill is going to have a problem. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1:Get a hole in the guard. The next thing you know you got product building up. You get some bearing issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get some bearing sparks and stuff and away we go. Yeah, I mean especially with the dry air in the winter too.
Speaker 1:One thing we see about the housekeeping is A lot of it can be elevated work. If it is, who's going to do it? What times of year? What's the scheduling look like? Maybe I want to do it next month, but the contractor, whoever used to do it, is booked for three months. I've got a plan that is part of my housekeeping schedules. I go through it.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that it's important to consider, like I said, weather and time of year, because you may not call getting things unclogged that are up high. So if you've got some clogged legs or anything like that, you may not necessarily call that housekeeping, but summertime, when it's humid, especially in the south, we'll see people put elevation with a hammer beat up stuff, trying to break product up and get stuff to start flowing again.
Speaker 2:And so, whether you call housekeeping, it's almost like housekeeping, yes, keeping it clean, but also the repair and maintenance side, Absolutely Housekeeping keeping things in good condition so that they flow right, work right, we don't get some of that seepage of moisture in there, seals and you know stuff like that.
Speaker 1:The other one's being clean outs and, by the way, we do have a personal podcast this week.
Speaker 2:She's been needy this week, I don't know.
Speaker 1:The bin cleanouts we will see. Sometimes it's contracted, sometimes it's internal, sometimes it's time of year, sometimes it's part of a confined space, so there could be different factors going, but we still see some opportunities of bin cleanouts. Or maybe it's like the slope of the inside of it. Well, we don't need a contract to clean that because it's not really scary. But we're going to slide down in here and try to clean that out a little bit. But should we really?
Speaker 2:I've seen how we can justify that it's not a confined space because it adds a lot of extra stuff.
Speaker 1:Because it's being cleaned out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we have to do it, yeah. So I think one of the biggest things is that we really just need to back up and evaluate how we remove people from that space Should they have a medical event. It doesn't necessarily always have to be the engulfment, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yes, sometimes the interpoints are way, way high for some of the stuff they're doing, or inspection of the bin before they decide they want to clean it out, and there'll be way up here. You're like you got to get them down from there to here.
Speaker 2:Yes. So it's like it's not always engulfment, it's not always the air is crazy. People can have a heart attack or a stroke at any time. You just never know when those events are going to happen. And so, regardless, we just need a way to remove that person safely, and if we don't have the right equipment or training, we need to be trying to source a contractor that does Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I will also tell you a big tip off on if this is a problem, because we all know at every mill this happens. We have to clean the bins periodically. Your confined space permits give you away. They give you away every time, and so that's the thing that we just want to make sure is really shored up, is because, you know, is making sure that they all dovetail nicely together with our program, with our training. It all fits nicely, because that's just one of those PMs that we know routinely happen, that regulators know. That's the first thing I can pull to see if we've got a problem with a whole lot of other stuff. And now the citations just take off.
Speaker 1:Another thing we looked at was the loan protocols. Now people say, well, how could that be? Because there's a lot of times at mills and farms there's one person, one maintenance or one person kind of keeping everything looked at on the weekend because there's not a lot of crewing there, so you got to have some alone and that may be calling someone every so often. But you have to have some kind of protocol to make sure we're checking on the people well, let's consider the, the mill property itself.
Speaker 2:some folks have somebody that's out away from the building, so so whether they're doing formulations or whether they're doing, you know, bringing it, dealing with trucks or scales or whatever, but we may have someone that's in a building away doing tasks from the main mill itself. That it's still on the property and they still are employed by the mill. They're kind of way out there and they're sort of the first contact for anybody coming on the property and they're a little bit exposed from a security standpoint than the rest of the mill. In addition to that, the other thing I would say is going with more of the security standpoint a lot of the mills that we see in rural areas, response times to them are not real short, generally speaking Correct, and we don't have a great way to secure them.
Speaker 2:So, they're wide open railroad tracks, maybe from behind A lot of them aren't fenced can drive on the property and walk right in. We don't have a way to lock doors and stuff.
Speaker 1:Right, so that was. My next one was security. Oh well, there you go, so there we go. So we got that handled.
Speaker 2:I worked at a mill.
Speaker 1:That's right. Protocols could also be where somebody's working at night finishing up a project before we're done. It could be that you know there's a contractor there and that contractor is getting relieved at the end of the day and I'm going to check everything they're doing. So I'm by myself, you know, maybe I go in early and I'm going to get the equipment running and check everything. I mean. So there's there's these weird times or maybe it's just I'm doing a maintenance task and I'm kind of out there by myself and we don't think about that. Person's been out there for like three hours. What are they doing.
Speaker 2:A lot of times we do hot work outside the mill. We have a shop away from the mill where we do hot work and things like that, because we don't obviously want to really do it inside the mill. Any of those security functions most of the time. If we are running 24 hours a day, the off shifts are thin on people.
Speaker 1:We may have only two or three mats, and they're still doing everything, still doing outside, inside. So the alone secured all kind of ties in together.
Speaker 2:When you're running around trying to do all the tasks and you're checking bearings and you're checking heat and you're doing sensors.
Speaker 1:And it's cold. You got to figure out how to thaw everything out.
Speaker 2:Yep, and you're also thing out, yep, and you're also, you know, in the control room and trying to run all this stuff, and then you're going to different bend decks. You may not notice if something's off until way off, absolutely all right, my uh last one today.
Speaker 1:Uh, for my meal safety. What do you think it is?
Speaker 2:I don't know, you covered elevated work.
Speaker 1:Augers. Yep, what you need to do is you need to go, look at every auger. You have figure out what risk goes with it, because augers tell me a story. Yeah, so if I go to a location, am I doing a sampling? Where the guarding's right or not for the auger? Is the auger down below like a receiving pit, and is it confined space? Does the auger when the receiving pit or the truck or tractor or trailer or anything brings product in? Now I've got to break it loose, but I've got to have the auger running for some of that stuff. So it's you look at augers overall. Look, I would take auger safety and kind of kind of bring it out and just treat it like it's almost its own world, like, how do we manage augers?
Speaker 2:Well, you, Well, you know it's a little bit different on the ag side as opposed to the manufacturing side. We don't ever check the integrity of any of the guards that are on the stuff and we do walk on top of the equipment a lot Elevator legs. You know all of that stuff, we walk on top of all of this so we have no idea when that's going to give way or if it's not doing good underneath because it's being exposed to some moisture content over time and product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I tried it. We spend time on these episodes looking for control, to look to get your mind opened up. What are different?
Speaker 2:risks. Where do you have augers? Are you walking on them? That's right.
Speaker 1:Are they elevated? Are you having to go down below? What if it's a flat ladder and it's cold out? And I see we did episode of a few weeks ago about look for where a hose is. Yeah, well, look, we're an auger. An auger will tell you a story that's that's guarding, and that's bearings and that's heat.
Speaker 2:You know start asking well, why is their footprints there? Why is their hammer marks there? What are we doing? What are we accessing? Should we be locking that out? Are you taking taking the guard off? Why are you going into that pit down there? Well, should that really be a confined space? There's no staircase there, so maybe that's a confined space. You know my receiving pits for number one, but that's where I start.
Speaker 1:If I was asked to go to a location, it was a mill I would start with augers. Start looking around. Now am I looking at security.
Speaker 2:That would be probably number two for me. My number one would be I would be looking for where they're locking out, because most of the time when the mills were originally built, there are no local disconnects, so everyone is going to the MCC room to lock out, are they? Are they going to the MCC?
Speaker 1:room or control panel. Are we doing?
Speaker 2:that? Where are we locking out? How are we checking for power?
Speaker 2:That's a good one so lockout is a huge one to me in mills. So you just want to check and really ask some questions how are we physically doing the lockout process? How are we checking for power? And then the next question is who is checking for power? Because that can be a different person than it is applying the lock sometimes. So you just want to ask some of those questions and see what your company is good with and how you want to manage that. These are opinions. Yep, these are our opinions, based on our experiences and our comfort level with things and how we've seen it regulated across all the different States, because we have mills and most, most States and in other countries if you guys need some more help or support.
Speaker 2:As we've mentioned in the past, joe and I do a lot on the ag side. We don't always talk about it and we don't always have pictures. Most of the time is because we can't bring in cameras to my farms because I can't shower in with those. I don't have them when I'm at the mills either, but we do do a lot with mills, so if you need some support, you need some help you were looking for.
Speaker 2:Maybe a one-day safety evaluation Got you. Allen-safetycom is where you'd go for that. Otherwise, allensafetycoachingcom is a great resource Also. I just want to remind you guys, liking and sharing these is so incredible. Yeah, let's like something, things and we'll do an episode on this later. But things I wish I would have known when I started being a content creator is how hard it would be to get folks to engage with the channel, just because we don't all want to make a big announcement Like, hey, maybe I didn't know that or you know, whatever. But liking and sharing and all of that good stuff really does help us.
Speaker 1:Spoiler alert we are not turning a massive profit. This is community service.
Speaker 2:Community service and volunteer hours. So, like I said, any little bit helps and we really do truly appreciate it. And until next time we'll see you later Stay safe. Thank you for listening to safe, efficient, profitable a worker safety podcast. If you're looking for more in-depth discussions or step-by-step solutions on all of the different safety and regulatory topics, please visit us at wwwallensafetycoachingcom for web-based virtual coaching and training, or at wwwallensafetycom to book our team for onsite services, training sessions to order merchandise, to learn more about our team and what services we provide in the field, or just simply to request a topic for us to cover on our next podcast. If you found today's podcast helpful and would like to support our podcast further, please help us by subscribing, liking and sharing this podcast with anyone that could benefit from the information we cover here, as that helps us to continue to put out this free content. Thank you.
