Posted on 03/26/2008 7:33:11 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
It was a fluke situation. Lawrence Penner normally never leaves his grain in the back of his truck. He and his brothers, who farm together in Cola, Man., have never all been out of town at the same time. But one week in February, Mr. Penner ran short of storage space and loaded his canary seed, due to be delivered to a buyer the following week, into his truck ahead of time.
He and his partners left it there a few days, unattended. When they returned, they discovered the truck and its cargo had been stolen. Whoever did it had brought back the truck. The grain was gone.
"It's somebody that knew what they were doing," Mr. Penner says, adding that he suspects the $10,000 load of seed, the price of which has tripled in 12 months, "probably isn't too far from here."
He is just one of a growing number of farmers victimized by grain rustlers: As the price of commodities has soared, so has the incidence of agricultural thefts.
It's a problem on both sides of the border. Marquis, Sask., farmer Doug Froehlich had 1,200 bushels of canola snatched from his grain bins last month - a booty worth roughly $16,000.
In January, Kansas police began investigating nearly a dozen reports of thieves driving their trucks up to farm bins and siphoning out tens of thousands of dollars worth of wheat. A bushel of spring wheat, which has historically traded between $3 and $7, has spiked as high as $24 in recent weeks.
"The value of it now is such that it would be very worthwhile for a thief," says Maureen Fitzhenry, a spokeswoman at the Canadian Wheat Board.
California growers have reported a rash of almond heists - a result of the price having tripled in the past few years. Barley futures fetch twice what they did in 2006. Canola prices are up 50% over last spring's contracts. Over the past three years, soybean futures have tripled. The market has been just as bullish for oats and corn. Farms have become treasure troves for looters. A report from the Washington, D.C.,-based think-tank, the Urban Institute, calculated losses from agricultural thefts in the United States are now US$5-billion - though the real figure is perhaps 10 times higher, because uninsured farmers often don't report their losses. Those producers with thousands of bushels stored might not even notice their missing grain for months.
That's one reason farms make alluring targets. Plus, they're isolated, going unwatched for hours when owners head to town with a load of grain or for Friday night dinner. The logistics of this nation's market in particular - limited holding capacity at rail and port terminals - mean grain is stored for long stretches on the farm, Ms. Fitzhenry says. For someone who knows their way around an auger, breaking into a bin and funnelling out a truckload's worth of cereal can be done in an hour.
Getting rid of it can be trickier. Buyers usually have long-standing relationships with area farmers. A stranger appearing at the local elevator with a semi full of soybeans stands out. Selling wheat or malt barley in the West requires Wheat Board permits. But an under-the-table transaction with a farmer who doesn't ask too many questions, eager to add to his inventory, would likely go unnoticed.
"No one's going to dispute if you have an extra 10 tonnes of grain in there. The buyer wouldn't even know," says Rolf Penner, a Manitoba farmer and director of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.
Producers are getting nervous. Lynn McLean, who farms near Rosetown, Sask., says he has been ploughing large mounds of snow across his driveway to stop, or at least slow down, any would-be thief. "Maybe he'll decide it's easier just to go somewhere else," Mr. McLean says. "Some of the crops you're looking at maybe $50,000 for a load so it's quite a bit of money."
Ron Kroeker, owner of Country Graphics and Printing in Rosenort, Man., makes something called Cropgard, handfuls of number-coded confetti pieces that farmers mix into their grain, allowing buyers to trace the ownership. He says he is getting five times as many calls as he did this time last year, and it's still the off-season. "There's definitely more concern out there, but we'll really find out this summer when it's a little bit closer to harvest time," he says.
As the stakes of the grain business rise, farmers across North America will have to adjust quickly to the new reality, Mr. Penner says. He has already ordered surveillance cameras for his bins and no longer leaves the keys in the truck. "It's a new wake-up call," he says. "Nobody ever locked up their bins before. I'm sure there are a lot of guys locking them up now."
I expect people to start picking off the cattle in the fields around here as beef prices escalate.
Anyone with a truck and an auger could steal enough to buy themselves a house in a few hours.
Government Intervention...
So righteous Dude!
Everything gets worse when the nitty witty a**holes intervene.
A sign of things to come.
How swell is it that we have that butthole McCain giving speeches on Global Warming in L.A. today!
Just hit me upside the head with a shovel now ‘cause I don’t thimk I can take this crap anymore!
This is our guy? (Time for revolution!!)
once upon a time, salt was, too.
for all we know, broccoli could become as gold.
someday we might [metaphorically] toss crude over our shoulders for good luck.
If McQueeg keeps on his ego trip, we will end up with a Crazed Feminist (aka...Lesbian in love with a Mooselimb..see Huma) or a Mooselimb in love with Africa.
This has to be some good times for the agricultural areas, it’s not just the crops that we’re burning (ethanol) but even hop prices have gone through the roof. Maybe the coming recession (maybe it’s here) will affect the big cities and the burbs, and spare the countryside this time...
When cattle trucks going into Fort Worth (TX) had spills, cattle got lose a few times over the years. Most would be found grazing on the shoulder or on the median or on a car when it crossed the median.
But the news report would sometimes say, “Most cattle recovered, some still missing.”
The question is how many of them ended up in someone’s else’s hauler or on someone’s grill that night.
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