Negligence led to Mississippi grain bin death, officials say

GREENWOOD, Miss. (AP) — Inspectors with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration say a South African teenage farm worker suffocated to death after falling into a grain storage bin because a Mississippi soybean farm failed to follow federal workplace safety standards. The agency says Bare Bones Farms violated federal law by failing to ensure that workers wore full-body harnesses connected to a lifeline before four of them were engulfed by soybeans inside a storage bin in an Oct. 2022 incident. A 19-year-old South African farmworker suffocated after his body wasn’t recovered for five hours. OSHA has proposed over $90,000 in penalties for the violations.