Everybody who lived through the 1950s and 60s knows what silos are, Right? Those giant underground missile tubes where the nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept! Well, this post isn’t about those. (Although I saw a prepper show once that used one to make a completely excessive but really cool bunker.) This post is about the grain storage silos that dot the breadbasket of the country; and what all they mean to a prepper.
Salty’s Note: This is the first part of a multi-part series called BugOutLand Basics. The idea behind the series is that Salty and Spice… a couple that lives in BugOutLand (an area where people are much more likely to be going to be bugging out TO than FROM), want to share some basics about living in BugOutLand that may not seem obvious to a lot of people from the city, suburbs or coastal area.
First things first: What’s a silo?
Silos are giant cylinders, usually made of metal but occasionally concrete. Roof cone-shaped or flat. Often clustered together with various pipes and ladders sticking out or on. They are often referred to as grain bins, and although grain bins and silo’s are not technically the same thing, we will refer to them as if they are (because with one major exception* the differences don’t matter). They’re used to store grains: corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.
Here’s a typical modern silo / grain bin setup for a small farm operation.
There are three main places you find silos. The biggest ones are usually owned by big agribusinesses and placed either at shipping hubs (railroads or riversides for barge traffic) or production facilities (such as for animal feed, ethanol production, or food processors). Animal feed lots also have them — full of feed, naturally. Smaller ones are owned by individual farmers. They use them to dry crop and store it until they judge the price is best.
It’s hard to go anywhere in Iowa or Kansas where you can’t see at least one cluster of silos. The rest of the midwest is pretty rich in them too, but hills make them easier to hide.
Silos mean food.
So, those big cylinders are often full of some kind of grain. Since you can see them a long way off, that’s a good thing for a prepper to know, eh? There’s often other food sources around too, such as the cattle meant to eat the feed.
Silos can also hold dangers.
If food is scarce, going to where everybody can see is a giant food source is not likely to be trouble-free. That one’s pretty obvious though. There’s one more significant danger anyone who goes anywhere near a silo should know about.
Most people out here in the land of silos know somebody who’s been killed in a silo explosion. What? People so anxious to protect their grain they MINE their silos?!? Um, no. When you move that much grain, you generate a lot of very fine organic dust. Dry organic material in that fine of pieces, thoroughly mixed with oxygen, is highly explosive. Any spark can set it off, from static electricity to a scrape of metal on metal. I don’t think I know anyone stupid enough to have intentionally lit a match in a silo, but that’d sure do it.
Handy silo trivia
Salty and I are cyclists, and like to find new rail-trails to explore. (A rail-trail is a bike trail built on an abandoned rail bed.) When we are in a new small town and looking for the rail-trail, it’s easy to find: Head for the silo. The town silos were built along the rail lines. Farmers would sell to the silo owner, who’d store it in the silo until he could ship it out on the rail line.
What’s the point? Rail beds tend to persist as flat, smooth, fairly straight paths between towns or along important routes. Small waterways are usually still traversed entirely painlessly, as the culverts the rail builders usually used last a long time. Sometimes longer bridges are still usable on foot; sometimes they’re gone. At any rate, they may be a much lower traffic and easier walking path than many other options.
The abandoned rail beds, unless converted to rail trails, do traverse private property in many cases. I’m not saying use them; I’m not saying don’t; situations differ. I am saying I would certainly respect property rights if it looked like I was going to trespass where anybody might care. That’s both a moral and a practical consideration; in an emergency you should expect people to defend their homes. If the bed is a rail-trail though…Easy rolling!
* An exception to the silo rule
When traveling through the country, you might see some purple silos with white roofs. These are different inside, they have “breather bags” that are used to compress air out of the grain. Basically, rule of thumb is if you need to open a silo for grain and you don’t know exactly what you are doing, leave the purple ones alone. They are pressure vessels of a sort, and they need to be properly operated by somebody who knows how to do it.
So, what do you suggest people do around a silo or it’s contents? Would you like to purchase some grain from the owner of your chosen silo? Were you planning to just fill your BOB and bug out? Just curious.
Well, I don’t steal from my neighbors; or recommend others do that either. What I would do depends on situation. If I were hard up for food, I’d try to trade labor for food. Somebody with a silo full is likely to need labor more than food themselves; making for good pricing. I do use them to orient, especially to find rail lines or abandoned beds (and rail trails) or the positions of towns from a distance. I wouldn’t go into one and with a flame for a lightsource, or carelessly open a Harvestore. The rest is situational.
Ok thanks. Just wondering. And a tip: don’t eat the corn or the soybeans. They’re GMO. Wheat is not GMO but it IS often sprayed with glysophate to dry it down for an easier harvest. It’s still better than the corn. Happy trading. I’ll appreciate the labour. Happy trails!
A silo explosion isn’t even close to the biggest danger. They are actually pretty rare and the conditions have to be perfect to get an explosion. The biggest danger, which you didn’t address and quite frankly I find completely ignorant on your part, is suffocation. People fall into silos all the time and it is usually fatal. In fact most fire departments in farming areas have specialized training and equipment to deal with a silo rescue. The contents can also fall on you if you open the wrong door. Silos are a lot more complex than what you describe them to be, especially the bigger modern ones.