Jim Lenz :
Stay tuned for an insightful conversation that promises to shed light on the future of autonomous rail car loading solutions. Let’s get started. My name is Jim Lenz, your host and producer of the show, and director of global training and education at GEAPS, where the mission of the Grain Elevator and Processing Society is to champion, connect and serve the global grain industry and our members At GEAPS. We work to be the global community and thought leader for the grain industry, which feeds and fuels the world. Thanks for listening today and for joining the network of thousands of other grain handling and processing professionals across the globe taking strategic steps to grow professionally. The Whole Grain Show will give you the competitive advantage to win at work so you can make more of an impact. Joining us today are two distinguished guests from Rayhawk Technologies Inc. A trailblazer in this groundbreaking technology. We are thrilled to have Tom Boehm, president of Rayhawk, along with his father, Ray Boehm, the inspiration behind the brand. They’ll be sharing how their cutting-edge technology is reshaping the railway loadout industry. Also, we are pleased to welcome Brooke Blessington from LANDWERX and Dale Vinsand from Landus. They’ll provide valuable insights into the industry challenges and how Rayhawk solutions are addressing these issues head-on. We’ll examine the key features of Rayhawk’s innovative autonomous rail car loading system. So get ready to learn how Rayhawk Technologies is transforming the grain handling industry with innovative solutions that not only enhance productivity but also ensure safety and reliability.
Jim Lenz :
All right, today we have two special guests from Rayhawk Technologies Inc. A trailblazer in autonomous rail car loading solutions. Joining us is Tom Boehm, president of Rayhawk, and Ray Boehm, the inspiration behind the brand, who will shed light on how their innovative technology is reshaping the railway loadout industry. Also joining us are Brooke Blessington from Landworks and Dale Vincent from Landis to highlight the industry challenges in this sector. Thank you all for joining us. Appreciate it. It’s going to be an exciting episode. Let’s start off really broad and kind of narrow this down. Let’s hear from Tom Bain and his father, ray. Could you start help our Whole Grain Podcast listeners with a sort of setup of the history, the story of how Rayhawk came to be Well.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
The story goes back a few years now. In fact, it goes all the way back to late 2019, when a client in the industry had approached us with an idea of automating real car opening and closing processes in the efforts to improve safety in their industrial setting. At that time, there was no technology available, but there was hardware and computer advancement. At that time, there was no technology available, but there was hardware and computer advancement. And we are blessed with a very intelligent group of engineers and computer science people, and we started passing the idea around the table and saying is this possible? Could we do it? Would we do it? And after some time we started getting some traction on ways it could be done, mechanical attributes of it, the complexities of it and so on.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
In the meantime, we were doing a fair amount of market research.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We were reaching out to a number of clients in both the mining and the agriculture industry to ensure that there was a strong need, that this was indeed a challenge in the industry, and I would say that over the course of a number of months and upwards of close to a year, both answers kind of came together, the technology started to take shape and we really started to gain a solid understanding of the importance of this technology and what it could mean to the safety and efficiency and the operations of large-scale facilities in both agriculture and mining.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
And safety is no joke. We all take it very, very seriously and, regardless of the industry vertical, everybody’s facing the same challenges of being able to do more with the people that they have and meet the global demands on their products. So during that market research time, unbeknownst to my father, he was being questioned repeatedly about the safety implications, as he had a history of working in the mining and loading rail cars, and maybe I’ll pass it over to Dad here to explain what some of those might have been Well back in the day.
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
A lot of things have changed up nowadays. Like back when I started loading cars, there was virtually no safety. You were on your own up there, there was no safety belt, there was no glasses, there was nothing, just you and the rail car, the rail car. But as the safety got better, you got the glasses and you had earplugs and everything just picked up in the safety lines, and so it came a long way, but you still have to open them car lids. Somehow Somebody has to open those car lids and it’s just that simple. And it’s just that simple and it’s just great to see the technology that they got and the safety that is going to be provided by that opening system. Like it’s huge, it’s really something.
Jim Lenz :
So, Ray, you’re the inspiration behind this. If you don’t mind, could you add a little bit more? Your history, your profession.
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
It went way back to 1968 when the mine first opened, and at that time it was mostly bags, believe it or not. We loaded bags into boxcars and that didn’t pan out because the nails were. You know, grain boxcars. And that didn’t pan out because the nails were. You know grain boxcars are like the wood is all worn, the nails are sticking out, and so they kind of got away from that and then they started going to bulk. That’s where the rail car opener lids opening from the top began and it just progressed as time went on, like everything else. The safety got better, the loading got faster, and it’s just the way it is. And I spent 11 years in one mine loading rail cars. So through those years there’s different things that went on. You know it’s just a normal procedure on, you know it’s just a normal procedure.
Jim Lenz :
Let’s dive into Rayhawk Technologies’ mission in revolutionizing railway loadout operations.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
It’s really straightforward. You know it’s our goal to improve safety and efficiency through autonomous loading solutions, if we can remove the. You know there’s lots to be said around safety and I think Dad said it well that over time you take the technologies that you have and you adopt them to be able to improve the working conditions for people, and that included things like the fall of the belt just a simple belt that then progressed to a fall arrest harness as we see it today is a five-point harness and then to a retractable lanyard and then to a cable track, if you will, that people could walk up and down rail cars and have a little bit more mobility. But these are all just small steps towards protecting around the larger risk, and the larger risk is that somebody’s still working at heights, somebody could still fall off the rail car or fall into the rail car. You’re still working in inclement weather and various conditions it could be dust, could be heat, could be extreme cold and you’re still dealing with the challenges of the job, which is it’s kind of backbreaking work. I think, dad, you had said it best in a prior discussion that you know when you look over a 12-hour shift and the length of a unit train and how many cars you fill during that shift. You’re bending over, touching your toes approximately 1,500 times per shift, and you know when you think, okay, that’s fine, it’s not fine for me, but it’s fine for others. Then you add in the fact that you actually have to do some physical exertion while you’re bent over, whether that be operating a latch or reefing on a lid, and then you start to believe and understand okay, we have lower back injuries, we have twisted ankles, we have skinned knees, we have absenteeism from work, we have insurance claims, and it just goes on and on and on.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
And even to the later technology that large-scale producers and shippers have adopted, and that is continuous loading of a loop track system where the train never stops. So all these other precursors that I just described were on stationary. Well, now we’re actually upping the game. We’re making the real car move while we’re doing all this, and people are required to transfer from one car to the next without getting off the cars. And you know, if you have some background in industry, you start to put this together in your mind and say, holy smokes.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So the car is moving, the person is stationary while they’re doing the job, then the lanyard is moving. There’s just so many variables. Fortunately, we’ve got some really heads up people that are doing this work. That’s got a lot to do with their safety awareness, but the results are, or the future is, that we’re increasing production, we’re increasing speed, we’re increasing all these things. We’re just we’re racing towards. The risks are getting higher, even though we’re putting all the technology we can. So why don’t we deal with the problem? Why don’t we just take the person off the rail car? Yeah, just take them out of harm’s way.
Jim Lenz :
You just described obviously a very dynamic work environment. So many factors that go into this. Let’s make it easier, safer, efficient and improve the process to load and unload Ray. How do you think Ray Hawk is going to change the industry?
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
Well, there’s more than just the danger of being up there, like one example that I found, which I didn’t mention in the last interview in a cold day, when you get out there at 8 in the morning and they have their track mobiles plugged in, they’re inside and everything, and when you fire up a cold diesel motor, the inside of that building is just full of diesel smoke and you’re breathing that in and there’s no avoiding it, because it’s just part of the thing. That’s just one of many advantages of not being up there. You know somebody has to open them lids, but if you can do it without having the people up there, that’s fantastic.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
You know, one way we had talked about it in the past is that you know, once upon a time safety glasses weren’t a thing either. You know, they just weren’t in existence and they were invented and they were duplicated. And now they’re so widespread that you know, to not wear safety glasses in the workplace would be almost criminal. You know, in a lot of ways right, it’s just a norm, it’s not even an exception. It’s a norm, it’s not even an exception. And when you look at what the Rayhawk technology means to the safety around loading rail cars, we’re just in that early adoption and commercialization phase. But in reality, if you look years down the road, the interest from government, from insurance companies, from large-scale industrial users is so strong that it’s not hard to see that, if you were to look five to eight years down the road, that it’s going to be commonplace everywhere.
Jim Lenz :
Yeah, revolutionary. It sounds like the mind shift I think that is going to take shape over these next couple of years is just, I think, going to be amazing. So you both kind of discussed the motivation behind developing autonomous rail car loading solutions to address industry challenges in the grain industry, in the mining industry and other industries. So, adding to that sentiment, that statement, explain again how the technology fixes those industry gaps and saves lives.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Well, quite simply, it just removes the human capital on a farm’s way. It’s as simple as that. Without having to put our human capital on top of the rail cars, we can still perform the function, which is critical. I mean, we’re in a massive continent that has the ability to produce and export so many goods around the world that hauling these goods to ports to do to circulate them around the world is critical. It is the, I mean it’s absolutely critical to our, to our operations. Without that we can’t produce. We would only produce what we can consume locally and therefore our business is is underpinned by the ability to not only provide that function but to do it safely.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
If we can’t do it safely and if we can’t do it efficiently, well then all the other things, all the other pressures of business come to play, from negative publicity to a lack of favor, perhaps from our shareholders, our investors, to we’re just not holding our position as a world class and when I say the collective, the royal, we I’m on behalf of the customer base, that it’s everyone’s goal to be seen as a grade, a investment, top, world class producing company that instills confidence in not just the investor but the customer themselves. Everybody wants to be a part of that story, knowing that they’re buying from a sustainable company that offers low risk and a steady supply chain, and that’s more than just a brand on a bag that’s got to do with. Are you hurting people? Are you a risky operator? Are you always shut down because things happen? All these things come into the picture, right.
Jim Lenz :
Yeah, you provided a really good capsule of the dynamic environment. All right, so, tom and Ray, you’ve definitely shared insights into Ray Hawk’s journey and your commitment to safety, efficiency and reliability. It’s good to know the background, but now let’s provide listeners what this is all about. We want to have you provide an understanding of autonomous rail car loading solutions, so, if you don’t mind, let’s go ahead and explore the key features and technologies utilized by Rayhawk’s autonomous rail car loading system. Let’s start with opening gantry.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
The opening gantry is replicated with the closing gantry. It is the same architecture, the same structure and in fact, depending on the function if we’re talking about opening and closing lids we’ve built an ambidextrous tool that can be utilized for both. Now, indeed, it utilizes different sections of the computer code and it uses different steps and processes, but the architecture as a whole, the mechanical structure, is very much the same. So just to talk a little bit about the opening side, this technology uses three different cameras on it and as the rail car as if you can imagine, I guess for the listeners to describe this system it looks a lot like an overhead gantry crane that you might see in the industry, where you have two long rails suspended off the ground of a certain height and then you have a bridge that goes across that with a trolley that allows the crane to move longitudinally along the long rails and then across the short rails. So we’ve adopted some of those similar engineering principles and reapplied them in a unique way and that is to be controlled completely by a computer which is instructed by the vision recognition system. Now there’s other little overlaying technologies in there, but if you can envision as a rail car comes into the operating window of the overall gantry structure, then the cameras can identify that it is a rail car.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
It can identify the orientation, the location, the height, the width, everything about the rail car, and in particular focus in on the latches and on the lid positions so it knows is the lid closed or are the latches closed? Is the lid open or are the latches open? Is it coming in with the hinges on the north side or the south side, or the east or west, and so on? And based on those orientations and based on the recognition system, the cameras that identify hey, that looks like a latch 99, certain of it, it’ll go down and it’ll now start to execute a specific set of actions to be able to open the locking mechanisms and open the latches. Now, it’s not just one latch, there may be multiple latches. So the computer system needs to be intelligent enough to know what kind of rail car is this. Does it have three lids with six latches? Does it have five lids on it? Does there overlapping lids? These types of unique aspects that are critical, you know, so they can make the right operations to open rail car.
Jim Lenz :
Excellent, Great overview. So that was of the opening gantry and you shared. The closing gantries are very similar to that. What about the air knife enterprise solution? Can you describe that?
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We live in such a large continent, we can have all kinds of things.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We can have snow, we can have ice, we can have dust, we can have lots of different things happening.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So often rail cars may come into the operating window and they may be covered with 6 inches to 12 inches of snow, or maybe more if they’re sitting stationary for some time.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
And we’ll need, in order for the cameras to be able to recognize where the lids and latches and orientations, there’s going to be a requirement to move the product of snow or other debris off the top of the rail car.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So what we’ve done is we’ve developed a method of utilizing a combination of a plowing system to reduce the bulk to a brooming system to help agitate and get rid of, maybe, the stuff that’s more frozen or crystallized, and, lastly, a blower to help clean the snow or the other debris from between the walking rails and the lid edges and so on, to get it as clean as possible. Now, interestingly enough, we’ve also been asked to utilize that same technology on the outgoing side, after the system is closed, and the predominant reason there is that in the event that a rail car is overfilled and there’s a little bit of spillage on the side. It’s important to make sure those rail cars leave clean, so we want to get rid of any kind of product that might be overfilled and off from the perimeters to make sure that the rail car leaves the facility as clean as possible.
Jim Lenz :
Wow, that’s really exciting. Of course, I’d like to do research before I meet with folks I interviewed for the whole grain show. I was invested in that. I wanted to see this in action. I did, and when I read that you know cause there can be a lot of snow on top of this by the time it gets there, I’m like what is? What are they going to do? You’ve answered that solution and now I just heard that there’s a blower that can do that. I’m like my mind was already blown. My mind is like kaboom. That’s just really impressive. And you’ve thought about the problems, realities of what can happen as they come in. So now let’s talk about how it affects production efficiency.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Well, yes, let’s do that, but I don’t want to miss the second part of your first question. That was on the enterprise solution. Yes, and the reason that will connect together with the blower assembly and so on and into the operating efficiency is that the enterprise solution allows us to capture so much information on this rail car being filled that it could be very valuable to the producer or to the shipper. Now, just as we had mentioned that the rail car is expected to be clean when it leaves the facility, what about pictures? What about recorded information that is specific to the seals that may be applied to the rail car or specific to the actual rail car itself? You know, often when we talk a lot about what we know in the industry is a transfer of care, custody and control no different than when a farmer or a producer ships their product to a terminal or to a facility. They transfer that product either under a contract or some commercial terms, but ultimately they’re transferring the care, custody and control of that to then be loaded on a train, which then goes to a port facility, on a ship and perhaps to another country. It’s very important to have that information to say, you know what, when we received that material from the farmer, from the producer. It was a certain grade, a certain quality and therefore we’ve got good record of that. There’s technology for that Now, when it gets loaded into the rail car, having the ability to prove that the rail car was clean, that the rail car was properly filled, that the product quality was there and was properly secured until it gets to the port facility, then it transfers again. All this information is possible to package together with our cavity inspection technology, with our seal application or removal technology to record the seal numbers, our car recording information, and can be packaged with a logistics shipping document to basically be part of that information trail from farm to table, if you will. And so that’s super important.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Now I’ll jump over to your other question about efficiency. If you know, often rail cars will be delivered. Um, you know, we have some wonderful rail companies that ship the product down the rail. That’s their logistics team that has to maximize those rail utilization and therefore, when you get a load, when you get a train, a unit train to fill, sometimes it shows up exactly on schedule and sometimes it maybe doesn’t just because of other complications, and often what you will find is that we know a unit train is coming, but we don’t know exactly when. Sometimes it shows up a little late, sometimes it shows up a little early. If it shows up a little early, often you know producers or producers sorry shippers will have to scramble to get their loading team ready to go to get working on this. If it happens to be over a weekend, sometimes that means calling the crew in to get the work done.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
What this does is that you’re always giving a certain amount of time to get the job done and if you don’t have the people ready waiting to do that which may not be the most efficient business model as it is but if you don’t have those people ready and waiting now, your clock is ticking. And if you don’t release those cars on schedule, then there’s other demurrage charges and rail fines and so on from the actual transport carrier, from our rail lines. So often what we see is we see a compressing timeline come into play that is forcing shippers to be able to load faster and more efficiently, you know, so that they can meet the schedule. So it is a good example. Sometimes you’ll get a rail cars dropped off with an eight hour window to get the job done, but by the time you get everybody there, you’ve only got six hours left.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
How important is the speed of loading now? And, as we had talked about earlier, the faster we load, the higher the probability there is for error. And the severity of errors when you’re working around the rail industry is not fantastic, right, you’re dealing with big equipment that doesn’t stop easily. You know mistakes are not very forgiving, right. So with the Rayhawk technology we can actually help meet those expectations.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We can help start voting sooner because you’re not waiting on people to arrive at the work site. We can have more consistent operation where, if nobody has a hurt back or an injury or even has to put under fall arrest harness, we can start voting right away and help the shipper meet their deadlines, meet their timetables, while deploying human capital to other, perhaps more meaningful tasks like grain cleaning or other aspects of the operation that don’t require them to be working at heights. So efficiency is a big part of that and through our research we see people racing towards wanting to load a standard rail car in under three minutes. That’s fast, and if you were to ever watch somebody working on top of a rail car, for them to work at that speed continuously, one after the other, especially on a loop track system where the train is not stopping. That’s a very demanding job.
Jim Lenz :
Great clarity. You’re providing incredible understanding of your solution. Let’s jump to weather rating. Can you speak on that?
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We’re a Canadian company and often we take our jokes around the world as far as the extreme climate conditions we get. In reality it’s a beautiful country up here but we do get some cold weather for sure and honestly we get some extreme heat. To quote in Celsius, we can be minus 40 degrees centigrade, which is darn cold, in the depths of winter and we can be in excess of plus 40 degrees centigrade in the summer depths of winter and we can be in excess of plus 40 degrees centigrade in the summer. Both can have adverse effects, especially on the mechanical and structural components and on the computer side.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So our goal, through the design of Rayhawk, has been mechanically simple and computer complex. I referenced earlier that our design is a close cousin, if you will, to a standard gantry style crane and for those that are familiar with those cranes they can recognize that that technology has been in use for decades. That is, it’s a proven technology. It’s got great reliability, data behind the mechanical aspects of it and as we’ve been specific to select certain computer hardware, we’ve been very cognizant about what will work at these extreme temperatures. So we have a minus 40 to plus 40 temperature rating on our equipment and you know, honestly, we feel quite confident it can operate with outside of those windows. But to be honest with you, when you’re shopping nobody seems to publish ratings beyond those windows. So we’re kind of bound by the manufacturer to a certain point.
Jim Lenz :
Now, both of you touched on insurance premiums. There is a clear link between your solution at Rayhawk Technologies autonomous rail car loading systems and its connection with reduction and insurance premiums. So if you could go in a little more detail with that, that’d be great.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
You bet and you know there’s certain things that we know pre-Rayhawk if you will and there’s certain things that we’re learning even to this day. I’ll maybe start with kind of the workers’ compensation, employee injury type of approach, and I’m sure we all appreciate that. You know we want everybody to come to work safely and go home safely, but we’ve all been doing this long enough to know that lower back injuries, twisted knees, these types of things happen in the workplace and there’s a cost to that. You know there’s an efficiency cost to operations that now that worker may be missing for a period of time and maybe you have to hire temporary labor or shift your resources around to meet your operational goals. But behind the scenes, your underwriters that are insuring these employee compensation packages look at your injury prevention practices and they say, well, how many claims a year do you have and the more claims you have the at your injury prevention practices and they say, well, how many claims a year do you have, and the more claims you have, the higher your insurance premiums, your multiplier rates go for the hours that are worked on the job site and this is something that a lot of people don’t often pay too close attention to because generally it hits more of a corporate office level or higher and not necessarily at the site specific. But insurance premiums for employee coverage is not cheap insurance. This could be tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual premiums if you happen to have more injuries than others, right? So that’s a big part of it.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Since Rayhawk’s been getting out there, particularly after we kind of showcased and got launched at the Jeeps in Kansas City at GEAPS Exchange, we’ve been fortunate to have some conversation with some very, very large corporate underwriters, people that are insuring the agriculture industry and the mining industries, and they’re asking a lot of questions.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
They’re asking a lot of questions around how this can reduce risk, how this can reduce, you know, any kind of employee injuries or business risk to these facilities. And it’s been a great conversation, especially to hear the feedback from their side to say, you know, they nod their head and they’re like you know what, if people are looking for ways to reduce their operational premiums towards lost production insurance, unplanned outages, where are the critical points of their operation? This is great tech, this is the tech they can adopt to help lower their business risk. And being the president of Rayok Technologies and having the opportunity to be involved in some other companies, I know firsthand what it means to manage business risk. If you can reduce your business risk, everywhere, from your financial institutions to your insurance underwriters, everybody looks at you more favorably. You’re just a better investment on everybody’s part.
Jim Lenz :
Again, great clarity, really important points to come across, I think, for our listeners to take into context of this solution. So that kind of leads to the next part of the conversation. We’re going to bring in our guests here from Landus and LANDWERX. So very excited to have Brooke Blessington from LANDWERX and Dale Vinsand from Landis. Don’t want to make any assumptions. We have listeners from 72 different countries have listened to this whole green podcast. As a result, if we could have Brooke Blessington here, step into this conversation, tell us about LANDWERX and Dale Vinson tell us about Land, highlight a little bit about what you do, what the organizations do, I’d appreciate that and we’ll kind of link that then to this conversation here that we’ve had so far.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
Okay, Dale, do you want to start off or do you want me to go?
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
You know, brooke, I’d let ladies go first, but it makes a little more sense for me to lead off here. So my name is Dale Vinsand. I’m the director of grain operations at Landus Cooperative. We are a 60-plus location grain and agronomy cooperative located mostly in the state of Iowa. We do reach out to other states now with different versions of that footprint 600-plus employees. Many of those are related to our day-to-day operations, especially in loading rail cars. We’ve got 14 different facilities that load rail cars. Many of those are 110 shuttle capable on class one railroads. The majority of those are.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
So our exposure to this is a daily item for us at Landus Cooperative and it’s something we’ve been researching over the past couple of years. We’ve been very aggressive at upgrading our facilities to allow them to be managed and run by fewer people as labor becomes a shortage out in rural America. That includes the actual mechanical facilities as well as our computer operating items such as our PLCs and our remote operation capabilities and how we support those as well. And one thing that as a group we always recognize that we are going to continue to struggle with was how we are going to handle that person being on top of the rail car.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
Many people in our industry, including myself, always worried about how we were going to replace what your eyes and thumbs can do of the human body, and I was very excited to be Tom at this year’s Jeeps exchange down in Kansas City. I’ve been a member of GEAPS for 19 years, getting ready to go on to my 20th, and I’m always excited about the technology we can bring back each time. So I’ll turn it over to you, Brooke, because I met you as you joined our organization and this is one of the technology we can bring back each time. So I’ll turn it over to you, Brooke, because I met you as you joined our organization and this is one of the things we had challenged LANDWERX with. So go ahead, Brooke.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
Well, thanks, Dale. As Dale said, my name is Brooke and I serve as the director of LANDWERX, so LANDWERX serves as the innovation arm of Landus. At Landus, we believe that food security is an important component of national security. We do everything that we can to support all of the owners and operators and everyone along that food chain supply. And at LANDWERX we’re designed to put farmers at the center of everything that we do and we deliver those in-demand solutions directly to the operators themselves and we also work to further that food security initiative that we have.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
And at Landus and at LANDWERX, we are consistently engaging with startups and other companies that we think will be changemakers in agriculture. So I was absolutely delighted at our recent Innovation Connector events that Dale made the introduction between our team and Rayhawk. And at Landis and at Landworks, safety is ingrained in our culture. It’s a part of everything that we do. Like I said, we care about everyone all along that supply chain, whether we’re telling the story of the way that our food is produced, as Tom alluded to earlier, or making sure that our employees and everyone along that supply chain is safe, from the minute the plant is planned for, to harvest it and then all the way to delivering to the end user.
Jim Lenz :
Thank you Gail, thank you Brooke. So, broadly speaking, every one of us here in this call are concerned about and play a role in food security right, and then we bring it down further. We want people in a situation that’s as safe as possible. So both of you just represent your organizations well described it and you’re always looking at areas for improvement and support and you’re looking for solutions out there, and you saw Rayhawk Technologies and had conversations with them. So let’s go ahead and, if you don’t mind, brooke and Dale, highlight the industry challenge a little bit more. Highlight how they are impacting LANDWERX and Landus.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
Well, I’ll start there from the truly operational side of the business. Well, I’ll start there from the truly operational side of the business. Dale, within Landus, we have multiple trains being loaded throughout our company. I think at one point we well not think. I do know that we loaded nine trains in 48 hours at one point last year. And when you’re sharing labor across different facilities, that is, it’s really taxing on our field employees to be able to handle that amount of grain moving at any given time. So being able to start investigating with Tom and the team at Rayhawk the ability to reduce our labor requirements per train both has a financial incentive to it as well as sharing our resources and making our labor more efficient with the skilled labor that we have available to us, that would probably be the biggest challenge that we see from the truly operational side of the business. Thank you, dale.
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
Brooke.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
Yeah, at LANDWERX we really specialize in collaboration, and so we see Rayhawk being part of the solutions to the problems that we’re seeing takes all kinds, whether we’re engaging with other industry, academia and really just weaving that all together to make meaningful impacts in the community. And so, knowing that we’re putting people in harm’s way in the transportation supply chain, there’s a lot of work to be done across our industry and across the continent in those areas, and so we at Landus and at LANDWERX we engage with a number of different startups and we closely monitor what these companies are doing and look for future collaboration opportunities so that we can work together to bring the best solutions for our farmers and for all of our end users in agriculture.
Jim Lenz :
Great points there and we’re excited that you and your organization is investing in new technologies out there and it’s great that you saw and exposed to Rayhawk technologies through Dale and what he found about it at the recent GEAPS Exchange. So that’s fantastic to get all parties together here. Thank you both very much. Let’s touch again on ensuring safety and reliability. Let’s touch again on ensuring safety and reliability. Let’s highlight Rayhawk’s commitment to safety through advanced safety precautions and features.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
At LANDWERX, we’re always looking for different types of innovation. So we look at innovation that could be incremental and improving a product that’s already out there. We look at adjacent innovation, where a different type of technology is brought over into the agricultural industry, or sometimes technology that exists within agriculture and transferring that out. And then there’s other times that what we’re really after is that transformational innovation, and I know that Tom was talking about all the solutions that they brought forth and, Jim, I believe you called it revolutionary, and I think that that really speaks to the type of innovation that we need and the type of innovation that really will change the way that agriculture goes to compete in the days ahead. So we really are excited to look at the way that Rayhawk is taking a different perspective, looking at safety and protecting those who are out there, providing for all of us and really transforming an infrastructure that we all know and use every single day forming an infrastructure that we all know and use every single day.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
Jim, in addition to that, I’d like just to follow up when we’re talking about Ray Hawk and the members of Tom’s team over there. I’m very impressed by Tom’s team’s ability to solve a complex problem, so the reason that I introduced Tom and his team to Brooke and the team at Landworks was to engage on other topics that we have coming forward. Tom reached out and solved something that many in the industry hadn’t tried working on yet, and I want that same commitment to other problems that we have identified within our business.
Jim Lenz :
Can you discuss how the system delineates autonomous areas to prevent operation when personnel are nearby and the implementation of SIL-rated emergency stops?
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
I could probably take that one there.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So for sure you know, when we’re dealing with autonomous solutions, particularly when you’re dealing with rail cars and you’re dealing with large gantry style structures like the Rayhawk is there’s opportunity for injury if safety is not followed.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So, as you can imagine, we would want to make sure that kind of human capital or employees are not in the working area while the Rayhawk system is engaged. Therefore, it’s very important to have the best of the accelerated safety equipment proximity detection, light curtains and so on in place to prevent any access or unplanned entry into the working zone by any kind of workers that may be in the area. This is something that’s customized site by site because there’s a lot of variability out there in facilities and how they load rail cars, how they access rail cars Is it by a gangway that drops down to the rail car? Is it by a working platform? Alongside of our detailed engineering phase, and we work closely with each client to make sure that the safety system exceeds their safety policies and procedures, and we take that all the way through to operator training and a full commissioning process to make sure that these systems are in place and maintained in years to come, that the systems are checked regularly, so that every day can be a safe day.
Jim Lenz :
Excellent, Tom. I want to invite you to elaborate on predictive maintenance modeling and its role in ensuring system reliability and uptime, for sure.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
So, as I mentioned earlier that we’ve borrowed a few bits and pieces of technology, particularly on the mechanical aspects for this creation, from the overhead crane industry, and there’s a lot of history of gantry-style crane operations out there. In a former life I actually had the opportunity to manage a crane services company at one point in time, and as a part of our business. It was an arm of one of our businesses and you know regular maintenance of overhead cranes is often, more often than not, focused around the wind chain systems, the cable systems, the hooks and the brakes and so on. Indeed, the trolleys and the end trucks and things like that are actually a very, very durable part of the overhead crane system and that’s the part that we’re borrowing and bringing into our technology. Now we have a patented design throughout North America for this technology that mechanically simple, computer complex strategy to allow users the confidence to say you know, if that beam happens to crack, there’s a local guy that I know can help fix that. If there’s a bearing goes on an end truck.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Well, there’s a handful of crane service companies in the area that we know stock parts for that particular bearing.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
You know it’s because we appreciate that uptime is everything for that particular bearing, you know, is because we appreciate that uptime is everything With the computer complex side.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
It’s very easy to deploy over-the-wire type support and solutions while also ensuring that we have local partners that can help if something needs to be tested or a voltage needs to be measured. Or you know, we need some technical hands-on on the site level and all the way back to that measured, or you know we need some technical hands-on on the site level and all the way back to that enterprise solution. With the technology we’re deploying we can actually even monitor the motor torques that are running this equipment. So if we start to see that there’s a trend in motor torque value that is changing over time, that we can relate that against temperature, we can relate that against seasonality, we can relate that against number of operations and by trending that across a wider spectrum of a number of RIOC installations we start to get some predictive modeling that can then give us some advance notice, say, hey, you know what things are, okay now, but maybe next year we should look at replacing a bearing or making sure you clean your rails or you know various parts like that.
Jim Lenz :
Very, very thorough. Thank you so much. All right, now let’s dive into how things were set up in Ray’s day and how really not a whole lot has changed. Some has changed, but not much has changed today.
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
Ray has changed, but not much has changed today. Right, I can’t really comment on all the things that have changed in the last 20 years, but before that it just I don’t know. Like I said, we used to have to catch samples with a take a pail on top of the car and two scoops out of each hopper. We were on a three hopper car, which most commonly we were loaded at that time we used to have to also catch three samples. So you’re on there again, and now I’m sure they’ve got automatic samplers.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
We all offer a little bit of support there. I think everybody agrees that some of the process equipment has helped. You know, as you mentioned, dad, about sampling. Now there’s the equipment that is going to help with that and, as Landis and Landworks knows, there’s a lot of change in process technology in the filling equipment. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is the full arrest and the worker on top of the rail car is still there. And if we want to say what’s changed around that, we have changed that environment because with all this advanced and processed equipment I think, dale, you mentioned earlier PLCs and automation and advancement we’re able to work faster than we ever could. The chute size itself is even bigger right and the scaling systems are quicker. Everything gets sped up, everything’s sped up and, as we know, with speed things happen faster, good or bad. So if we still have that person on top of the rail car, they’re still in harm’s way. So if we still have that person on top of the road car, they’re still in harm’s way.
Jim Lenz :
Now let’s kind of lead back to Landis and Landworks here with Dale and Brooke. Can you highlight?
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
how the Rayhawk system would mitigate those challenges. I’ll take that one, jim, just a little bit. So our relationship with Rayhawk is just getting off to a good, solid start here and we’re recording this in early May, which is a heavy agronomy season for us and really takes a lot of our personnel to execute that here within our organization for the farmers. So as we come out of that, we’ve identified a team that’s going to start working with some of the information that Tom has given us for our review of this product and taking steps to start the implementation. There’s a lot of things that we have to think about and work through with the different rail lines on its implementation at our facility. But, getting down to it, our organization’s goal is to really work at starting to alleviate that need for the person on top of the rail car, just long term.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
That is the main driver for this conversation. There’s lots of things when we’re looking at the capital expenditure versus the return on that investment that are somewhat unable to be quantified. You got to jump to a lot of scenarios about injuries and the number one goal is just eliminating that injury or the possibility of it, and you know we talk about fall protection and stuff like that and that’s probably the first major risk everybody thinks about. But we do load rail, car and some of that bitter cold or that extreme heat which are very taxing on the human body as well. So from a frostbite standpoint, the cold and heat exhaustion on the really hot days.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
And the other one that falls into it is thunderstorms and lightning. We suspend operations during that time for our personnel safety, so it’s one more area that this can help alleviate some of those needs.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
It was something that a potential customer shared with us as well is that we’re very focused on the safety aspects and they had actually offered that. We’re missing a key driver here and that is equality and opportunity in the workplace. That the loading of rail cars because it’s a very laborious and demanding on the body, it’s limited to a certain body type. We’ll say that People got to be able to physically do that work over and over and, as we’ve talked about earlier in the show here, there’s a reducing level of people in the workforce that want to. We just don’t have large farm families anymore and our smaller centers are becoming less populated and people are moving to the cities more often and we’re struggling to find people and resources to help, especially in the rural areas, and do this work.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
I think we’re missing a good chunk of our available force and the fact that this is a task that’s kind of a hazard to say. It’s kind of built for that 160-pound to 250-pound body type that can just have the strength to rip those lids open and go through the physical demands of it. We can automate this. That changes everything Now. It opens up your potential workforce even to perhaps somebody that’s not physically capable to be able to be in the control room and running the system right, and that’s a huge part of it for every business out there.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
I think that you know, when you consider agriculture being one of the oldest and most traditional industries that are there, like every other industry, we have to be able to evolve and become even more efficient. And just the story of Ray and his experience as an operator down in the mine informing the Ray Hawk solution that’s really important in innovation that you’re considering who the people are who will be using that. You know somebody who has insider knowledge and able to come up with the best capabilities and the best solutions for the future and, like Tom was just saying, just expanding that workforce across the sector, just attracting new talent, bringing the youth into what agriculture will become and providing more technology-centered solutions. I think attracts a different type of perspective and that can just continue to leverage those new perspectives into groundbreaking and game-changing technologies like what Ray Hawk has come up with here.
Jim Lenz :
Yeah, I like that all of you brought this down not just to an organizational level, not to an industry level. You’re really talking about individuals and the care and concern that you have for that. So you know, if you look at industries overall, different sectors agriculture is actually one of the most efficient industries. Now you’re taking it to a whole other level in addition to that, so excellent. So let’s turn to future developments and industry impact. Let’s see if we provide some impact here from the group on exploring the potential future developments in autonomous rail car loading technology and their implications for the industry, for the railway loadout industry.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Well, you know, thanks for the question and through the whole context of the conversation we’ve been really focusing on loading the bulk granular materials into open style, open top hopper style cars. But that’s only a small area of what is shipped down the rail. Specific to the granular, we’ve talked about the air knife solution, we’ve talked about the cavity inspection, we’ve talked about the seal removal, seal installation and the enterprise solution that goes along with that. But going down to rail cars, we also see large volume liquid style cars, rail cars. We also see large volume liquid style cars. And you know, if you ever want to, if you have young children and you want to play a fun game at a railway crossing, just Google the placards as they go by and you’d be very surprised what’s in some of those cars as they go along. And once you really start to understand, okay, what’s in those cars, you start to gain even more appreciation of who’s loading those cars, how is that happening, and so on. Our roadmap, on our development roadmap for this year and into next, is to solve these same questions and these same challenges in the liquid car industry, because you have everything from peroxides to acids, to oils, to a variety of different additives that are competing on the rail lines for space and also have a very strong export market but present a whole different set of challenges. They may be loaded hot, they may be gaseous state, they may require certain safety precautions. And you know it was quite unfortunate. It was a little over a year ago. I got called into a meeting with a large shipper producer that ships liquid product and they asked if we had a technology developed and I said we’re working on it for liquids and I said I’m sensing some urgency. And they shared, they said we wish we had one yesterday. You know they didn’t get into what happened but you could tell by the tone of the conversation that it wasn’t good right. So there’s a need there. The fall arrest, all these things are the same but the attributes are a little bit different and there is some actual barriers. So that’s definitely on our technology development side.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
Outside of the rail car and particularly into the ag industry, we’re also developing and working on a new technology for automated truck sampling. So the purpose for the automated truck sampling is a number of things. One, to be able to do it in the absence of people present to run those samples, offering that variability of sample while maintaining quality. So you know the randomness of how the samples is grabbed from the incoming truck. The second piece of that is it needs to be coupled with the grain grading aspects of the operation, and really it’s in pursuit of what Dale had mentioned earlier. Is that how can we get these agricultural facilities turned into 24-hour operations where they could be receiving at the beck and call of the producer and can be shipping at the beck and call of the rail line or the shipping facility at port? If we could get to that level where you can push product through as quickly as possible well, that helps every receiver shipper operate at their optimum efficiency and while having a strong focus on safety and keeping people out of harm’s way.
Jim Lenz :
That’s a great examination of how this is a game changer, not just for the grain industry. Rail car loading system Now you mentioned looking at technologies for sampling Amazing. Let’s discuss digitalization, advancement of brain handling operations.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
Yeah, I mean I think there could be, you know, two components here that I think would be important to hit on, and one is just kind of circling back to that sustainability aspect that we talked about earlier. You know, telling the story of the product the end user is really like in our hyper-connected global world, the end user is really, really interested in not only you know the macro of what they’re eating, but like who created it, where did it come from? What’s the story of all of that and I think that’s an important component that Rayhawk and this technology can help answer on the rail car side of things. That’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing and paying attention to at Landis and at Landworks as well is how do you help tell the story of how that food was produced? You know, all the way from, you know, the people who own the land to the people who tend to the land, all the way to the end consumer. You know that piece of the storytelling is extremely important in today’s world and the way that we’re all such a global community and the other part of it, jim, I would say, would just be the trajectory of digitalizing everything that’s happening in agriculture, at Landis.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
We are really interested and we’ve got a couple of new types of innovative solutions that are coming out. At LANDWERX we have the Tesseract synthesis and at Landus we just launched Conduit, which is a different type of platform and a different company, and Dale I hope that you know a little bit more about it than I do but that’s really something that we see changing. The face of agriculture is really those two pieces and I think that they do go hand in hand. They’re kind of woven together where you’ve got to have the digital components, because no one person can put all those pieces together, and it does take automation and it does take, you know, a perspective shift of how do you capture that information, how do you layer it together so that you can make sense of it, so that the end user sees the value of what was produced.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
Dale, we do have a website for conduitag. Conduit is going to be a unique platform that is going to offer a different way to purchase inputs for our farmer owners as well as not just our owners but other farmers throughout the United States. In addition to that, it’s got some financing options and stuff available to it through Brooke and her team helping develop Conduit. Anybody interested in it would need to create an email account with us to be able to get more information on that.
Jim Lenz :
All right, before we conclude, let’s provide a quick summary. Let’s do that for each of you. I will start that with Brooke real overview statement, dale same thing summary statement, and then Tom the inspiration came from you We’ll have some final concluding, summarizing statements, and then again, president and CEO of Rayhawk Technologies, tom as well. All right, let’s start with Brooke.
Brooke Blessington, Innovation Hub Director at LANDWERX :
Hey, thank you so much. You know at LANDWERX we’re just really thrilled to engage in all different types of innovation and especially to be introduced to a company like Rayhawk. At Landis and at LANDWERX we’re really interested in finding those change makers for agriculture and opening up doors for the innovation that needs to occur in our sector. Couldn’t be more excited to be part of the story and to figure out ways to collaborate with Rayhawk and companies like them in the future.
Dale Vinsand, Director Of Operations Support at Landus Cooperative:
Brooke did a really nice job of wrapping it up from the land aside and I’ll probably just tie it in a little bit with Jeeps and the exchanges as well. Here have innovative companies come to that exchange each year. Keep the excitement up, Overcome the exchange. It’s great to go and see old friends that you have met over the years and stuff like that that you’ve done with projects, but it’s always refreshing just to see a new face with a new technology that keeps moving everything forward, not just for Landus but for everybody that’s involved in the agricultural sector. That’s terrific. Thank you, Dale.
Ray Boehm, Inspiration Behind the Brand (Rayhawk):
Well, thank you for giving me an opportunity to say a few things. It’s great to see the young people with all this technology. It’s something else.
Jim Lenz :
Thank you something else, thank you, and you’ve taken it so far, ray. You were the inspiration. It is so incredibly special to have you on the Whole Grain Podcast, because people want to know where this came from. This wasn’t a thought yesterday. It wasn’t a thought a year or two ago. This really evolved from your personal experience and that is really special. It’s important to know the story behind a product or service. People want to invest in it and you’ve all provided a great resource. So, tom, if you could, conclusionary statements here, yeah, you bet. First of all.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
It’s just truly amazing as we go along and have these opportunities to do a podcast and work with companies like Landis and Landworks, to take something that starts off as a dream and a vision and an idea and see it grow into a technology and there’s risk all along we talked about that along the way but as it’s growing.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
But then when you start to meet great people and you start to see that they see the potential and that they see the, the strategy, the advantage and the efficiency and and how, what it means to their business, it starts to almost make its own heat and create fire. Right, and and it’s every time we have a conversation like this and and or we you know we attend Jeeps exchange down Kansas city and see the excitement that the topic raised down there it’s just it’s. And see the excitement that the topic raised down there. It’s inspiring, it just keeps us going and we’re just really pleased to be able to bring this to the market and help people solve problems, to honestly evolve as an industry and make sure people get home safe and we can honestly make sure that North America as a whole stays in its rightful place as a number one in the global supply chain of the agriculture mining sectors. That’s really what we’re trying to do, right.
Jim Lenz :
Thank you. I just want to say those whole grain podcast listeners who are joining us today, this impacts you, this impacts your organization, this impacts the industry. I think that one of the best things you could do, whole grain podcast listeners, right now, is to share this episode with your colleagues, share this episode with your team, your organization. It’s easy to do. It really gives a showcase of again the story, the meaning behind it, the technology and how it can support incredible organizations like LANDWERX and Landus, but I think, also an action from this, and we’ll include this in the show notes for this episode. The visual of this working is a must, and so I’m going to ask you, tom, how can listeners right now, after this episode, how can they see this in action? Where do they go, how do they connect with you, how do they connect with their team, how do they connect through the video and other things? And we’ll include again this in the show notes.
Tom Boehm, President of RayHawk Technologies Inc.:
You bet the best place is to drive the traffic to our website at wwwrayhawkca. But you know, with the wonderful search engines we have, if you Google or search Rayhawk, you’ll find us on Instagram, you’ll find us on LinkedIn, you’ll find us on your website. There’s YouTube. There’s a tremendous amount of documentation out there. Unfortunately, we do have some industrial installations operating right now, but you won’t see a lot of documents out there that are publicly available simply because of the legalities around sharing customer information. But we’ve got a lot of great information out there. Wonderful to watch Great music in the background. It’s fantastic.
Jim Lenz :
Excellent, excellent, excellent. So again, thank you so much. I appreciate you all joining us. I want to thank you, tom and Ray from Rayhawk Technologies, for making this episode possible and for teaching others and informing others about this really groundbreaking technology to improving safety, improving efficiency, and it really can be implemented in both large and small operations with railways. So thank you LANDWERX, thank you Brooke BLESSINGTON for joining us and thank you, Dale Vinsand from Landus for your great insights and supporting this message. I really appreciate that. I just want to encourage listeners to explore more about Rayhawk Technologies Inc and their transformative solutions that are out there Again. Check out or info rayhawkca. out more information. We’ll include those links in the show . . We’ll include the links to Landus and LANDWERX. Well, thank you all on behalf of the entire GEAPS organization, we thank you for being part of this episode fantastic, thank you, thank you.
Jim Lenz :
Whole Grain Podcast listeners, thank you for your participation in the show. Hey, don’t forget to share this important episode with your network. You can catch up on all Whole Grain Podcast episode at www. GEAPS. COM/WHOLEGRAIN . You can also catch up on the show by connecting with your favorite podcast app. Just do a search for a whole grain, hit the subscribe button. That way, all episodes will be downloaded to your device as soon as they are released. Plus, you can check up on past episodes as well.
Jim Lenz :
The whole grain show is a production of GEAPS, the Grain Elevator and Processing Society. The Grain Elevator and Processing Society is the largest organization dedicated to advancing the grain handling and processing industry. Be sure to check out www. geaps. com. That’s G-E-A-P-S dot com. The Whole Grain Podcast offers a terrific opportunity to spotlight your business organization. Want to sponsor an episode and be a featured guest? Please reach out to me, Jim Lenz, director of Global Training and Education at GEAPS and host and producer of the my email is , . We look forward to connecting with you. We thank Rayhawk Technologies Incorporated for sponsoring this episode. Their message was an important one and can really revolutionize the industry. Have yourself a great day and thanks for listening to Whole Grain.
