Summary
- In the US, at least 48 agricultural confined space cases were recorded in 2025, 22 of them fatal.
- More than half of all cases in the Purdue database since 1962 are grain entrapments.
- In 2025 there were 7 grain dust explosions in the US: 4 people died and 10 were injured.
- The authors believe that about 30% of cases never make it into the statistics at all, so the real numbers are higher.
For: owners and managers of grain elevators and agricultural holdings, occupational safety engineers
What Purdue University counts
For more than sixty years, Purdue University in the US has kept a database of accidents in agricultural confined spaces: silos, bins, pits, and manure tanks. In 2025, it recorded at least 48 cases, 22 of which ended in death. Among them were 21 grain entrapments, 38% fewer than in 2024. The ten-year average is about 60 cases a year.
The full database for 1962-2025 holds 2,477 cases, and 58.6% of them are grain entrapments. Historically, about 58% of these cases ended in death. The authors warn separately that roughly 30% of cases are never recorded anywhere, so the real numbers are higher.
How it happens
Usually grain has caked or bridged in the silo, and a person goes inside to break it up. While unloading is running, the grain underfoot moves like sand in a funnel. Within seconds the person can be pulled in up to the knees and can no longer get out alone. Often there is nobody nearby who can see what is happening.
The second hazard is dust. In 2025 the US had 7 grain dust explosions at elevators, flour mills, and a feed mill: 4 people died and 10 were injured. OSHA fines in these cases ranged from $50,000 to $100,000, and court awards to victims reached $10-17 million.
What a camera can see at an elevator
A camera will not see inside a silo, and we will not promise that. Some of the risks are visible from outside, where cameras are usually already installed, and rules can be configured for those places:
- a person entered the hatch area or the silo roof, with no partner nearby;
- someone is in a dangerous zone while a conveyor or unloading is running;
- a person without protective equipment is in a zone where it is mandatory;
- unauthorized people on site at night, near the scales or the fuel and lubricants store.
Each event becomes an event card with a frame and a time, and the person on duty sees it while the worker is still at the hatch. We have not yet run the system at a grain elevator, so we configure the rules for the specific site and test them in shadow mode before turning on alerts.
Grain and fuel theft
A separate topic for agriculture is losses: a grain truck drove past the scales, fuel was drained from machinery at night. There are no overall Ukrainian statistics on this, only individual criminal cases, so we will not make up numbers. In the UK, the insurer NFU Mutual estimated the cost of rural crime at £41.5 million for 2025, of which machinery theft was £8.3 million. These are insurer data, meaning only what was paid out.
Where to start
- List the places where people enter dangerous zones: hatches, roofs, pits, conveyors.
- Check which of them your existing cameras cover, including at night and in dust.
- Check that there is a written procedure for silo entry: permit, a partner, unloading stopped. A camera can show whether it is followed, but the procedure has to exist first.
- Decide who is on duty and how quickly they must respond to an event card.
- Ask any vendor where their rules have already worked in dust and frost, and how many false event cards they produced. We can connect to your existing cameras and start in shadow mode.
Where to apply this
- Agriculture and grain elevators
- Occupational safety
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