GREENWOOD, Miss.—A South African teenage farm worker who suffocated to death after falling into a grain storage bin would still be alive had a Mississippi soybean farm followed federal workplace safety standards, inspectors with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined.
Bare Bones Farms, located in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, violated federal law by failing to ensure workers wore full-body harnesses connected to a lifeline before four of them were engulfed by soybeans inside a storage bin in an October 2022 incident, the labor department said Wednesday. A 19-year-old South African farmworker, whose body wasn’t recovered for five hours, suffocated.
