Going back almost 100 years, the legacy of the farm bill largely tracks the history of food...
Farm Journal recently asked farmers through their Facebook page what’s the most random thing they’ve found in their fields. Here are their responses.
- Balloon with notes from a children’s classroom
Fred West, a Delaware farmer, was plowing his field one evening when he stumbled upon a balloon with a note attached to it.
“The balloon came from a Sunday school class 500 miles west of where I was,” West said. “I sent the balloon back, then all the kids wrote me notes saying they were praying for me - an awesome memory!”
- Hand grenade
In a nursey in Manhattan, Kansas, Agronomist Daniel Wright says he found something unexpected.
“The hand grenade was unexploded,” Wright says. “But we’re right across the road from Ft. Riley.”
- Antique glass bowl (perfectly intact!)
Shannon Lolmaugh was 8 years old when she spotted what she thought was a small, shiny penny in her family’s kiwi field near Lemoore, California. Had Shannon’s curiosity not spiked, she would have missed an antique bowl that was resting 3 feet below the soil surface.
- Cemetery
“I was riding through our brush looking for stray cattle and found a whole cemetery from the 1800s. My horse stepped on one of the headstones—that’s how we found it,” says Joe Miewes, a Colby, Kansas, farmer. “We ended up finding about 15 graves. Several were kids that died at birth and up to 5 years old. I can’t imagine what some of them lived through.”
- Artificial Christmas Tree
Near Brown City, Michigan, Precision Planting Regional Manager Jason Koning says he once found the holiday spirit in the furrows.
EDITOR’S TAKE:
Very interesting. Some things the farmers/ranchers found had value, but most merely peeked our curiosity. It is amazing that a cemetery was hidden on a rancher’s property all that time. And finding an antique plate completely intact in a farm field – what are the chances? These are the unusual finds, but it also opens the discussion for other things farmers/ranchers find, such as broken bottles or metal items that could puncture a tire that costs several hundred or thousands of dollars. Or what about trash that, if not noticed, in time could really raise havoc with a combine worth several hundred thousand dollars. Plus, think about the time and effort to clean up or remove these types of items from the field. Perhaps this creates an opportunity for CAD members to promote AgPack®. AgPack® provides thousands in exclusive rebates and discounts that could help farmers/ranchers offset some of the cost for all those unwanted items in their fields.
