Patenting ideas versus putting ideas into use

I read a few pages of the book “Animals make us human” (you can tell I’m now working in an agricultural environment). In a section on Technology Transfer there was a nice example of to prevent big companies from buying simple ideas, in order to patent them and to sell the products expensive so that small companies (farmers) cannot afford to buy and use them:

“After I finished my designs I purposely killed all the patent rights by publishing my drawings in a meat magazine. That put the designs in the public domain. No company anywhere in the world could patent any part of the design. I wanted to make sure it got used. After I published my drawings I went to a big trade show for the American Meat Institute at McCormick Place in Chicago. The sales rep from the big equipment company was there, and he was so mad he wouldn’t talk to me” (p. 204).

The system the person talks about is now used in many plants in several countries.