Government Cameras on Private Land, Agricultural Ponzi Schemes, and Brutal Farm Accidents

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] He jumps up like he's in his sock feet and he runs through the field there, blood shooting three or four feet, gets in his cab and takes off for the highway to get some help. And once he got to the highway, nobody would stop 'cause his whole cab was covered in blood. Oh my God. This is Kate Crosby in the Central Valley of California. I'm a quantitative geneticist, data scientist and agronomist, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today's interview is with writer Chris Bennett, and as you heard in the introduction, this is a wild conversation. I had no idea what to expect when I invited Chris on, but an article had been sent to me by a group of friends where he was discussing a really alarming case involving the government and an individual that had a camera placed on their property. From there, I thought we would just discuss this topic and maybe a little bit about writing, but what I discovered in Chris is that this was a man born to tell stories and I was truly privileged to have him on. We're gonna get to that interview in a second, but I wanted to take a moment to give you a personal invitation to join the Articulate Ventures Network. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you know that I created this as a way to continue to grow the community around people that wanted to have long form conversations. We have a whole bunch of things that you can go on and engage with courses, other people in the network that come from really diverse backgrounds.

Vance Crowe [00:01:34] And we've started hosting a thing that we call the Speaking Gym, where people come together, they have a chance to give a talk and then get real feedback, not just on what are they, how they deliver a talk, but also the content of the talk. This is a rare thing that people don't often get to do, and it's a chance for you to explore what you think by saying it out loud, you get to actually determine, do I think this? And how does it sound? When I put it into words. This week at the Speaking Gym, we did a little bit different of an introduction. We had each person introduce themselves as though they were a friend or coworker or boss, introducing them. And by doing this, you got to say, this is my friend, such and such, and he does this with work and this is what I really appreciate about him. Longtime listeners to the podcast know that this is called a sky hook, but by having you introduce yourself by giving your own sky hook, you get to practice and realize what is it that I hope people notice in me? And if they did notice in me and somebody gave me an introduction like this, how would it make them feel? By doing this, they get to see how they can introduce other people better, and it's a way to really grow in your communication skills. Every week when we get together to at The Speaking Gym, I give people new exercises and new ways to try things out, that might seem a little bit hard, but you can tell people really love this experience. So I want this to be a personal invitation to you, and you should feel welcome to join this group. We're growing over time and every single person that joins our community adds something to it that we couldn't have expected and always makes the group better.

Vance Crowe [00:03:08] So if you're interested in joining, there is a link below, but you can visit Articulate Ventures to find out more. So without further ado, we are going to get to this wild interview with Chris Bennett. And I do have to warn you at the end, he tells a story that is really Kindo graphic, and he's so good at telling the story. You will be transported there in your minds. So if you got little children around, it might be good for them to hear how dangerous farm equipment is, but it also is a rather gruesome tale. But I'm gonna let you make that judgment for yourself. I am so glad you're here. And now onto the interview. Chris Bennett, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Vance. Good morning, man. Very, very delighted to be on here with you. It is a privilege. So you are a writer for the Farm Journal, and there is no end to the irony of my life because just yesterday I published an interview with a guy where I was talking about I think people in that world of media are doing more to polarize things than almost anybody else. And so the next day I have you on, and so thanks for coming on. I I'm really interested in having a conversation with a person that is making observations for a living, writing 'em down and, and finding a way to make it interesting enough that people are willing to share either their money or their attention to, to read what you have to write. Hey, Vance, you bet, man. I mean, farming agriculture, there's 1,000,001 untouched stories out there in this venue.

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] They're just waiting to be told every farm's kinda like, it's kinda like a little island out there, even in this modern technological age. And a lot of the times you get out there and you find out almost invariably that the farms in question don't realize they're sitting on a wealth of stories. And so if you can get a guy to kind of reveal himself, reveal what's going on in their history on the farm, it's not an exaggeration to say right there, just in one location, you're going to have 10 stories just again that, that the fellows involved don't always know that, but they're rich. Fascinating stories, full of human nature, foibles, credits, you name it. Good, bad and ugly. It's there. Well, you shared a story that actually blew me away. I, I would say the closest thing to frightening me about the future that I have read in a long time. And it got shared in a network of, of people that I'm with that I think are very discerning about what they read. And they all agreed that what you wrote about was something people should know and understand is going on. And that's your article about a guy that had cameras placed on his property by the government, and when he went to remove it, he was the one breaking the law. So break down that story, man. What was going on there? Vance? You know, maybe you're a farmer with several thousand acres, maybe you're a landowner with such, but even if you're not, it's quite likely that maybe Vance, you have 10 acres to or two acres here, and whether you've got 10 or you've got 10,000, those acres are precious to us and we have certain assumptions on them.

Vance Crowe [00:06:31] And that is when you put your posted sign up or you're no trespassing sign up, you, you expect privacy and you expect them at least a modicum of distance from the government. That's simply not the case. And what I'm referring to is called the Open Fields doctrine. Lot of people have just simply never heard of the Open Fields doctrine. And it's such a, it's a such a relevant law or statute that it's a shocker to find out. People don't know about it. And it stems from 1924 case and a 1984 case in the Supreme Court. But before I even go there, what's relevant right this second is a guy named Hunter Hollingsworth and a fellow named Terry Rainwater's. Two landowners, both of 'em own relatively small acre, maybe a hundred acres a piece in Tennessee. And back in the winter of 2017, 2018, Hollingsworth was, I believe he, don't quote me on these D details, but I'm pretty dang close Vance, he was going duck hunting one morning. He went on to his land, which was posted north trespass and gates and so on. He didn't live there, this was hunting ground. This was farm ground. He was using the farm ground to basically raise corn and beans that he would feed the wildlife. So he wasn't sending this crop to market. And as he was rounding the bin one morning to go duck hunting, his headlights on his side by side flashed, I think it was eight, 10 feet up on a tree.

Vance Crowe [00:08:09] He thought, maybe I'm looking at an old deer stand. Maybe I'm looking at an old, maybe a coon, the eyes of a coon something, something flashed. So he stopped, got up there and shown his light. And sure enough, there was a trail camera there. He could see the functioning of the trail cram and the, the beeping and so on. He could see a solid limb or two. And it was, it was a little bit chancey that he even saw the camera at all because of the way his headlights had flashed. Well, you know, he was nervous as an alley cat, not his camera, it's on his land. He went ahead and took the camera down. And when he looked at the pictures that were on the camera, there was a Tennessee wildlife vehicle on there. There were a few people on there putting the camera up that he thought he recognized possibly as game wardens. I've seen one of the photos, it's blurry. So very difficult to tell. But regardless, he recognized who had put the camera up at that point. So make a long story short, he took the camera into his possession. And eventually right, eventually, Tennessee Wildlife and Fishing Wildlife came after him. They sent a somewhat of a SWAT team to his house. They raided his house one morning to retrieve that camera, and he went to court and he lost. And the reason he lost partially is because the judge relied on this open fields doctrine, which I'll put in a nutshell.

Vance Crowe [00:09:42] You know, if, if if, if your listeners and viewers don't get anything today, this would be the cogent point to at least take away. The open field doctrine says that you are protected as in the Fourth Amendment from search and seizure on your body, on your house, and essentially on your yard. It's an arcane term called curtilage, which would be maybe the acre or two around your house. Lemme repeat that. It'd be on your body, it'd be in your house, and it would be the little area around your yard when you get past that, right? The judge said, you have no right to protection from search and seizure by the government. So that's insane. That's insane. No, no one knows that. Like no regular person assumes that's the case. You assume if you own your property, people can't just roll onto your property. The government can't just show up and put a camera there. This, you're already at the point where I'm like, this is bizarro world, right? Vance, it produces a, I think in your normal American, it produces the visceral reaction, right? It raises the hairs up on the back of your neck. It makes you bow up a little bit because it doesn't compute. But what it stems from is a 1924 case, which 24 was in the middle of prohibition, and it involved illegal liquor, the 1984 case that also backs up open fields and allows the government to come on your land involves marijuana.

Vance Crowe [00:11:17] So the idea of open fields was, hey, if the government needs to come in to seize liquor, if you've got a steal somewhere, or if you've got illegal marijuana grows, they can come in to get that stuff. The problem is that once you take that and you extrapolate and you go beyond, where do you stop? So when I, when I contacted the Tennessee Wildlife and the, and Fish and Wildlife, national Fish and Wildlife, I had several questions I thought were relevant, such as who owns the footage, right? So Vance, I'm gonna just gonna throw you out there. If we put a camera up, unbeknownst to you beyond your yard, and we film you, right? Or we take pictures of you who owns the footage, who at the law departments is allowed to see the footage? How many cameras are out there? How many cameras can they put on Vance's land? The the, the questions go on forever, right? For example, if your wife Vance, if your girlfriend, if your daughter is out there sunbathing, or if she goes to the bathroom and she's captured on camera, or if two people are sharing a private moment on their private land, Lord, we're all humans, if that's captured on camera, who is allowed to see the footage and they refused with a blanket to answer any questions about the case, period, they wouldn't even answer, wouldn't even comment, period.

Vance Crowe [00:12:55] They directed all questions. Let's see, I think I'm telling you this right? Tennessee Wildlife deflected all questions to the Attorney General's office who also wouldn't answer, but I'll get into all this, Vance. Usually what happens in these cases is the government just says, we can't comment on pending litigation, but once litigation ends, they're still not gonna comment. So it's just a, it's just a double, it's, it's ridiculous. But in the case of this Hollingsworth fellow that I told you about in the beginning, there was another guy named Rain Rainwater. The same, exact same thing happened to him except he had, I believe he had two cameras on his land. His son found the cameras. Now, just as an aside here, this makes it real human. I think it's fair to say that what happened, what appears to have happened, Vance and the Rain Waters and Hollingsworth cases, is they had a past of run-ins with the game wardens. Rainwater's son had hunting violations and Hollingsworth had hunting violations. And Hollingsworth told me, he said, man, I'm guilty of some of these things. But the idea that you can take a fellow with hunting violations and then without probable cause, without a search warrant, you can then monitor his ground to most Americans, has a degree of outrage. There's a key point here also. This is where it gets really creepy, Vance, very creepy.

Vance Crowe [00:14:26] Those cameras that they had were not just taking still photos, for example, of Highlands Worth land. They had sim card in there. So whenever he entered his land or left it, somebody at TWRA was getting either an a email or a text or both telling them, this fellow's leaving, this fella's coming. Now you don't even have to have words again, it strikes you somewhere in your core, as this is very odd, I guess Vance, what's gonna happen in this case? And, and what's happening right now is a pro bono organization called Institute for Justice has taken the Range Waters, cases and the Highlands Worth cases, and they are representing those two fellas. And the, the, the bottom line of Institute for Justice is, hey, they're, we're in Tennessee. Tennessee, take Constitution will protect these two landowners. And there are several states like Mississippi, Montana, Vermont, there's several states where your state constitution protects you from such, but nationwide, there's almost no protection. So I, I think that after the 1924 case and the 1984 case, we are once again headed for open fields to go right back to the nine black robes. And I don't know if it'll happen, you know, within the next five, 10 years, but I think it's going to happen because of the effects now of modern technology. I mean, you know, you can put a camera on somebody's land and get nonstop footage.

Vance Crowe [00:16:01] And by the way, I also asked the Wildlife Department, I said, do y'all have a list of the cameras that are out there on people's land? And how many cameras do y'all have? No, no answer man. No answer. Well, I mean, like at, at this point, how does he even know if he got all the cameras? I mean, they maybe got one up there, but how do you know there's not five other ones? Excellent point. Excellent point. It it, you're right, this really touches off something deep inside of me because what is private property? Like if, if they can know when you're coming and leaving and they can take photographs on it, how is this different from it being the government, Sherwood Forest, where they own all of the everything on there and they get to control it? It's, it's, I mean, this goes to dark places really, really fast in particular because the, the scope and scale of technology is only going to empower people that have the ability to walk onto your property, put a camera up, and, and how is it not possible that they were trespassing when they went onto the property to begin with? Right? They, they, the government has access to the land Vance, if, right, if it's not that curtilage around your house, the house or your personal property, it, it makes no sense to most of us. And again, if you're a farmer and you've got 4,000 acres, right? You assume people are not walking around on your land. Private citizens can't, you can catch 'em and throw 'em off if it's the government Yeah. That they, they at this point in most states can do what they want.

Vance Crowe [00:17:34] And most people don't. They don't realize that. But let me emphasize again, you know, if, if you've got a guy like Highlands Worth and he has a camera up on a tree on his property, and indeed he gets out to use the bathroom or his girlfriend does and she gets caught on camera, people are going to snicker right and laugh. Well what if that's your wife or your girlfriend, right? Or your daughter. There's no snickering. Now this can happen to all of us and, and look most game wardens, my lord great fellas, it just takes a couple of rogues to be allowed to go on to sneak cameras onto guy's land. And bottom line is, you should have to go to a judge and present what you suspect to get a search warrant. Or if it's in the moment, then you have to have probable cause That seems reasonable to most people. But again, that's not what is going on Vance. So you said it's gonna go to nine robes. What happens in the meantime? I mean, if you're a guy that's already had somebody placing cameras on your property, you must feel as though somebody is watching you at all times. I would never be able to escape that. In fact, I think that was the most haunting part about reading your article was I started wondering like, well what is my, my domicidal, right? I I've got a little bit of property. Is it just the area that I mow? What happens if there's, you know, maybe 50 feet in the back area? I don't wanna mow, does that mean that they can now check that out that I I absolutely don't want cameras on here.

Vance Crowe [00:19:06] Yeah, range water claimed he range water actually lived on his land. He lived there with his son and he had another smaller house where a tenant lived and he claimed that the camera that TWR placed could pick up footage of the tenant's backyard. That's what it claimed. I don't know that for a fact. So that if that's the case, Vance would even break the curtilage rule where they could see onto the back area of where this fellow lived patently wrong and so many ways, man. So, and, and you know, Hollandsworth told me, man, he said, I, you know, I'm, I've just got this feeling like somebody's watching me all the time. I check my vehicle, I look under my vehicle. Are they audio taping me? Are they videotaping me? Range waters said the same thing. I I can't, I can't imagine what what that feeling's like, but that that case, like I said, it's going to go to Supreme Court maybe someday. And I, I would imagine I'll probably write another article on that at some point. That big of a deal. What's your sense for how widespread this is? I mean, you, you've been talking with people. I I got aton of emails, Vance, I mean, I got a flood of emails from people saying, Hey, this has happened to me in Kansas, this has happened to me in Missouri, you know, different states. But the truth is those are all anecdotal. So I had no idea to verify any of that. But yeah, I got a ton of people saying, for example, BLM, they come on my land, the game wardens come on my land, the Bureau of Land Management for people that don't know what that is.

Vance Crowe [00:20:42] Right? Right, right, right. But tho again, I just wanna stress that's anecdotal Vance. But I, I do know that if if the power for the government is out there to do that, then you're going to have individuals that certainly do that. Look, it's a nightmare story that range water and, and Highlands were told that they claim beyond the cameras, that game wardens on multiple occasions were literally like, this is what they literally crawling around in their bushes during hunting season and so on. Now, you and I vance, everybody listening to this knows that once you have people crawling in your bushes, if that happened, but you have people coming in and off of your land during hunting season, even not hunting season, somebody's going to get shot. That that's the nature of us as Americans. We, you know, landowner in Tennessee probably has 50 guns. That's not even an exaggeration. So I don't, I don't mean to say that the landowner's gonna go out and target a game warden. It may be the landowner that gets shot, you know, touch and go hot situations that don't have to be, just get you a warrant, get you some probable cause. And I mean, like when you're saying this for somebody that's living in the city, maybe they're in an apartment or they're just living in the suburbs, they don't have the concept that one of the reasons that you have guns when you go out to your property is you can encounter things and there's no one there to help you. So if you, if you find out there's a person there, they're hiding in the bushes, you, you don't really know what their intents are.

Vance Crowe [00:22:16] So that game warden might, might well be there trying to protect animals or, or fish or something and, and yet get themselves in a position where the other person feels incredibly threatened. And it's not like you can call up the police and have somebody come out there. So it, it's one of those things that city life doesn't always map exactly to country life, but you have to consider what people are living when, when they're living in the rural areas. Spot on Vance and I, I, I do wanna stress man game wardens. I've got friends that are game with wonderful, wonderful fellas, but this kind of thing can and obviously does happen, bottom line. So how does somebody like you, a writer for Farm Journal come into contact with a story like this? Man, I got a tip on that one. I got a tip on that one Vance. And somebody just said, Hey, you need to look into this. And the problem is like, with any job, you got a million things going on, a million stories. And that kind of story takes, that takes a chunk of time because you don't know who's telling the truth and you gotta go through some of those court documents and so on phone calls with a government and all the government regulation stories, Vance, almost invariably the government drags their feet because they know that they got you or they want you. So it just takes a lot of time, heck of a lot of time, man. But the, I'll tell you something, as far as regulation goes, there's a lot of stories out there that are similar to open fields about guys getting run over by people in a government position.

Vance Crowe [00:23:51] That part of the story is not in isolation by any means, when, when you're talking about taking the time to tell a story and, and how many phone calls you have to make and how long you have to wait for the government to get back to you, it, it, you almost sound like you're a reporter from a bygone era where, where people didn't, you don't have to crank out a story every 30 minutes earlier in the week, I had a woman on that said she was a food writer and she was expected to write three food articles a day. She was like, I don't eat that much food, so how am I supposed to do this? But you think about the level of research that you have to put in to make sure it's not just some hothead that said, oh, the government flew into my house, you know, guns raised 'cause of a camera and it's actually a lot more complicated. How are you in the situation where you can take the time to, to write these longer stories? Well, you know, Vance is gonna get me in trouble. I'll start running my mouth here, but I don't mind. The truth is that, you know, writing in the agriculture milieu, man, it's, yeah, you're expected to produce a certain quota regardless of what or organization you're with. And because of modern media, right? Farmers no longer need ag media for certain bits of information. In other words, a farmer can just get his phone out or a landowner and produce their own video or they can go find the information on Google.

Vance Crowe [00:25:25] But regardless, no matter what happens with media in the future, any kind, the narrative right, is still going to be of extreme value. You know, 10,000 years ago people wanted to hear the story around the campfire, and I would submit that 10,000 years from now, they still are, if you can provide someone with an interesting tale that has some degree of relevance to them, then regardless of whether you write 500 words or 5,000, they'll hang on because they're human and they have that innate curious quality. I know that's a very long answer to what you said about writing the stories, but you know, you can go mad, you can go insane Vance flipping press releases about the latest product out there. There's a place for that. Of course there's a place for that. But people want some meat, you know, they want more than that meat and taters, if you put a buffet out there and all you put on it is a bunch of desserts that looks great and it tastes great, but eventually people want something more. Yeah, I I get that every single day. I probably get four or five pe you know, press agents trying to call me to say, Hey, I've got this person be great for your podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:26:59] And you know, they're just trying to do a circuit and maybe they have a good story to tell. But that's a different thing than what I think you're trying to do or what I'm trying to do, which is let's find the stories that aren't being told that are gonna take some time to, to pull 'em apart and, and really look at it. And the, the trade off is the, the world won't re reward you with the millions of clicks and the, and all the, the ad views, but you've gotta, you've gotta have some kind of a guiding light because if what you're after are those clicks, you become a slave to 'em. There's an excellent book, I don't know if you've ever read it by, by Ryan Holiday, it's called Trust Me, I'm Lying. And he goes through and he, he talks about the economics of, of the media world and he basically makes a very strong case that it's not journalists being bad people. It's that that is the economics of it. It used to be people were paying for subscriptions and when they got rid of the subscriptions that that, that completely threw off the situation where people were paying for in-depth news. But he also describes that this was what used to happen when newspapers first got started because you didn't have a, an idea of the subscription service. It wasn't until the telephone came in and you could sell subscriptions over the telephone. It used to just be news boys handing out and they had a morning news and they had an afternoon news and they had to get rid of those papers. 'cause as soon as the afternoon came along, the old papers were dead and you had to do something new. Wow. You know, Vance the, lemme tie that into what I said when we started the podcast, which was the million and one stories that are out there, you know, right behind my shoulder and talking to you.

Vance Crowe [00:28:41] I don't know if it's my right or my left, but it's both. I point back here and I bring something up. I don't know if the viewers can see it. And you Yeah, I can see, because I was gonna ask you about this. Are those marbles, what are those, those, those, those are marbles. Vance. You are correct. And if you can see the bottle that they're in, it's embossed. So if somebody's listening on podcasts and can't see right now, what I was holding was a gin bottle with a little government warning there at the bottom, embossed in the glass. So the first of all, the bottle tells you that if it's got that embossment on it, it's about 1965 and below. So the first little deal is the bottle has to be old and then inside the marbles have to be old. What this is, is a bottle, and you can see there's a bunches of them back here with sharecropper marbles. So whenever I'm on a farm for a storage just goofing off, I'm looking Vance for those old sharecropper marbles, which date back 50, 7500, even further back than that. Then pick 'em up when you find them and drop 'em in one of the bottles. The bottles. My, I guess my little maxim here is that I have to find the bottle on site. So the bottle has to be found in a slew or a ditch at the farm where I'm at. And one of the big politically incorrect things about farms is your labor, right? For probably for centuries or or not for centuries, but certainly for the last 75 years, if they're drinking on the job or if they're drinking in between, they would take their gin bottles and chunk 'em in the slew or the ditch, right?

Vance Crowe [00:30:28] Sometimes Lord, right off the tractor. So you can go into those slews and you can find these old bottles, right? I'll, Vince I'll probably get an email from an irate farmer accusing me of lying. I'm not lying. And so I take the bottles, fill 'em up with marbles. Well, that's bottom line is that's a story, right? That, that the marbles are a story by themselves because they're sitting there and you can find them usually in the morning or in the evening. And the reason being is when the sun comes on a slant, it hits that ground. Obviously when you got full crop canopy, that's not gonna be the case. When you have bare ground or close to bare ground and that sun slants hits your farm field, it lights up locations where old houses used to be the old sharecropper houses 'cause of the crushed glass. And then when you head to that spot, you can find the old marbles, marbles, coins, things like that, that are still there. No one really cares, but they will some day, some archeologists will be out there 200 years from now digging up these marbles. Sorry to go on that rabbit trail, but that's, no, I mean I, you bring up a concept that seems so far away sharecropping as to as to be, you know, back with Egyptian times. But when you go look at the history of farming, sharecropping is not that long ago. There, there were a lot of people, and I mean, still people to this day do sharecropping in a way, it's just not structured in the same way.

Vance Crowe [00:31:59] So what do you know about the way farming was done in our recent history that people don't ordinarily think of? I'll tell you what, I'm itching, you know, Vance, I'm itching to do a story on the history of mules in agriculture because I've always been fascinated by the concept that when mechanization came at some point, some place in the United States, the last mule left the field never to return. And I thought, what a shame, what a dang shame that we don't know where that spot was. At some point, literally somebody took a mule off their field and never brought it back. The lights went out, somebody turned the lights off, you had the complete advent of tractors. And I thought, gosh, I never thought about that. You know, you don't even think about mules or there must have been mule breeding operations. Yeah, there must have been all the feed that would go along to, to have those mules talk all about this that you want. This is super interesting. Yeah, Vance, you can, it was an industry, right? The mules were an industry. So if imagine right, if you had a thousand acre farm and you had to have mules to work that farm, right? If you do the math on that, I, I can't even imagine. But you'd have these, you huge mule barns set up and the the people taking care of the mules, all of that were, were vital, vital to your, your operation. And you can find the remains. Like if you go out in fields today, you're going to continuously come across horseshoes, things like that.

Vance Crowe [00:33:33] And, and I, I should have mentioned, when I mentioned the marbles, one of the most exciting things to find, I mean this vance, this will get your blood going, is to find old mer mercury dimes. And a mercury dime is related to amulet a charm. And back in, let's say post-slavery days when people couldn't afford maybe jewelry, right? They could still get that mercury dime, which was made outta silver. They bore a little hole through it, and then once the hole was through it, they'd put a cotton string through and wear it on their ankle or wear it on their wrist. Well, when you find one of these in the field, man, that is precious because it's not just a marble that belonged to a child. This is a piece of jewelry and amulet for some of them you can Google the power of a mercury dime. It's, it's it's belief, I guess, related to man, I, I don't want to pretend like I know what I don't know. But anyhow, they're there and you can find them. I found a few, found a few rings, found lot of, lot of really cool stuff, man, people's lives that at the time Vance lived out in those fields and really never, never hardly left. When you look out at farm Fields today, let's say for example, you're in Mississippi and you look out across farm fields, you don't see anything. You see a crop canopy going forever. But before mechanization you had to have people out there in those fields.

Vance Crowe [00:35:05] So those fields were dotted with sharecropper homes. You had to have the people there in the field 'cause you couldn't commute, you know, they can't drive from 30 minutes away. So you, you look out at fields today and you think, boy, that that, that, you know, we've got too much encroachment on those fields. People are building houses. Well, back in the day, there's a lot more houses there were sharecropper houses all over the place. So the remains are there. Very fascinating, very fascinating to find, sorry to get up on that rabbit trail. No, how do you get, I've how plenty of government regulation stuff. How do, how do you get to the place in, in your life where you go looking for things like that? I mean, I think that's actually a pretty rare quality. I I never, I I have a friend that he loves going along the side of interstates where they've broken up the rock because he can find these old fossils from back. Oh yeah. When Missouri used to be an ocean, this guy, he goes by plant rod long and he loves that. But I go out there and it just looks like rocks to me. Just like everybody that's passing by the sharecropping area. They never see that. How is this always been an exploration? How did you get into the position where you're looking for marbles and gin bottles and mercury amulets? Well, I'm, see I'm, I'm married to the, the finest lady in the world. Wonderful, wonderful wife. And she is extremely proud of me because I have extremely simple interest. In other words, she let me go off and do my thing and it doesn't cost anything. He's delighted. Like vans, I, I don't, I don't have a shiny boat, right?

Vance Crowe [00:36:39] I don't have a big motorcycle. I just go out in the field looking for marbles or go out on the river, look for petrified wood. Let's see, I, I'll show you something really cool. Maybe your viewers have never seen petrified wood piece. My boy found that it's very unusual to find one that length and dimension because they break, right? Then normally they'll break. So we get out there in a river, man, look for petrified wood. So talk about petrified wood. That just looked like a piece of wood that's really dried out there. But what, what do you see when you see that? Yeah, it's, it's actually, once wood right gets trapped underground and you entirely cut off oxygen, the wood will change at a molecular level, basically turn into silica, turn into rock. And so you get that over time. Now, I don't know, man, if it takes a hundred thousand years or a million what have you, but once you get it sealed off from oxygen, that'll happen. I found a piece of wood all Vance man a couple of years ago that actually had the grub looking caterpillar that was sealed in there and stone. That was a bad dick for him. That was cool, man. Found some pieces, you know, 10 foot pieces and weighed 2000 pounds, that kind of thing. But most of the time I'm just looking for maybe arm length pieces that I can pick up and drag off the river. When I was a young man, I wanted to find the big giant pieces to show off. Not, not anymore, just some small ones.

Vance Crowe [00:38:11] That's all. So this is an interesting thing. You know, we talked at the beginning about these cases that are shocking to somebody like me. And with somebody like you, not only is it shocking, but you are very interested in the details and you're extremely curious in a way that I think it doesn't come natural for other people. So you must have had more stories that when you are really digging into the details, they start impacting you as a person. What are some of the stories that you look back on and you're like, when I wrote that story, it changed something inside of me. Right? You know, Vance, it's a scary thing to look back on the story because I, I can, I can assure you, and I don't know if all people feel this way, but I, I certainly do. If I look back on something I wrote last year then, and once I read it, I'm appalled. I think I can't be that bad of a writer, but that's human nature. But I do look back sometimes and some of these stories catch you and, and, and they keep holding you. They sit on your shoulder and once they sit there, they never, the grip never leaves. There's a case down in Louisiana that'll just blow you away. Vance, your listeners have probably heard about it. It was a case of a guy that owned, I, I think he owned tens of thousands of acres, most of it, or a lot of it was in a civil culture tree farm. And he got a call one day, his name was Edward Port Event. Edward got a call one day from Fish and Wildlife and they said, Hey, we're fixing to declare, I think it was like 1500, 1500 acres that you own as critical habitat for the Mississippi gopher frog.

Vance Crowe [00:39:46] And he said, Hey, hey, hey. You know, I'm, first of all, he was in Louisiana, the last hundred Mississippi golfer frogs were in Mississippi, I think like little tiny three inch things, something like that. And his land, they had determined was conducive to the Mississippi golfer frog, which they were afraid was going to go extinct. So they went on to his land, he claims illegally, he claims open fields, and they found that his land might be a haven for this frog. They did a study, fish and wildlife did a study and determined that long term, if he wanted to develop the property, he might lose 34, I think it was $34 million because of the critical habitat designation, which if it gets that critical habitat designation, you can't build on it. And they went ahead and did it. And he took them to court. He told them, Vance from the get go, man, he said, y'all are not gonna bring the frog on my property, right? You can go ahead and declare it. You can do critical designation, but I'm not gonna let the frog on my property. They admitted that they would have to, that the, the land was not hospitable for the frog. In other words, if they brought the frog, the government owned his land, it would die. They still did the critical habitat designation on his private land. And that required, that would've required them to, let's see, I think they'd had to clear cut the land. They would've had to plant longleaf pine and then they would require controlled burns every year or two, something like that.

Vance Crowe [00:41:23] He took them to court one step at a time. He was an attorney and he got the Pacific Legal Foundation to represent him, I think pro bono. And they went through every stage of court. And no matter what he did, no matter what argument he presented, he couldn't get any satisfaction because the government simply maintained the critical designation on his land. There was nothing he could do. It eventually worked its way up to the Supreme Court. And the reason Vance, that you hear about these cases and these guys can't make any headway is because of something called Chevron deference. And if, if your listeners don't know what Chevron deference is, they need to go look it up. It's a doctrine. I think that comes from about 1984 in a case. I think it may be, it was, I can't remember, United States versus NRD. That doesn't matter. Anyhow, what the doctrine says is that when you're in court, if a judge finds ambiguous language in the law, right, if the court finds ambiguous language in the law, which regulatory language and agricultural law is always full of ambiguous language, if a judge comes across ambiguous language, they can rely on the discretion of the agency involved. In other words, it allows the court to say, you know what, we're not gonna delve into this ourselves. We'll just rely on the agency. So it's a maddening, kind of like the, it's a Ian right? Rock of Sisyphus. You're pushing a boulder up a hill and it's continuously rolling down on you.

Vance Crowe [00:42:58] And that's what happened to Port event this frog, right? They wanted to turn his land, private land into this frog habitat. He eventually won eight zero in the Supreme Court, eight zero. It was pushed back down to a lower court. Bottom line is they left him alone, one of the rare cases Vance, where they left a fellow alone. But despite Portmans victory, that case stuck on me because when I interviewed one of the government officials, or maybe I could say it better, of someone related to the government's case, this guy actually told me in the interview, he said, you know what he said that day we're pulling, he's got tens of thousands of acres, 15 hundred's, not going to make any difference. He needs to roll over and let us use the 1500. He's got thousands of acres. And that, that hit me in the heart as an American, y'all, the government's going to get to the point where you become the arbiters of who has enough land and who doesn't. Right? This guy owned the land fair and square, regardless of whether he's got 10 acres, two acres, or 40,000 acres. You don't get to come in and say, Hey, we just, we just want a little bit, you know, Hey, if I got two acres, I don't want y'all to take a quarter of even one of my acres. So again, it strikes to the heart of what it means to me to be an American Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:44:30] I don't want 'em to take anything that belongs to you, and I don't want 'em to take anything that belongs to me. I, and when you get in a fight with the government, if you've ever been in the position or watched somebody get into one of these fights, it, they, you might as well be fighting against Thor or something because you, you have no power in that situation. And if they decide that they're gonna do something because a, a person that wasn't elected, they worked in a bureaucratic position, they worked their way up, yes, they may even have good intents, but if they decide that they're gonna run this out, it's not like it's costing them legal bills. The individual that's deciding that they're gonna fight you, they don't have to pay that. And if they lose, ah, they just go on to another thing. Whereas they are taking something from individuals. And I think there is nothing that makes a human being. I'm sure there are other things, but this is one of those things that if, if a person comes in the crosshairs of the government, how can you not become cynical about life? Right? How can you not feel as though you are the Sisyphean task that you're describing? Like you just have no power there. And I think whether it's this or I, I know a lot of people really suffer under divorce laws. I know that people suffer under all sorts of property things. It's, I I do think that reporting on these subjects, you'd have to be very careful not to come home and bring that cynicism with you and, and cloud your children or your, or your spouse with it. You know what Vance, one of the most distressing parts of these regulatory cases and government overreach, and you find this across the board, seemingly across the board, is that once the government is corrected, let's say they're corrected by an appeals court or scotus or even one of the government agencies actually corrects itself.

Vance Crowe [00:46:17] When that happens, you find that no one gets in trouble, right? In other words, if I mess up in my job, maybe do something that is ethically wrong, I'm going to get fired or reprimanded in some way. These government employees in these cases, not only do they not get fired, they don't get reprimanded. Life goes on, they get to reload and just continue. It's, it's maddening and it really makes you scratch your head as to what you know. I don't know if you've heard of the Randy Sers case in Maryland. Randy Sers, middle-aged fella was a dairy farmer. I think Randy May have been on 2000 acres, something like that. And he and his wife used to go to farmer's markets and sell their products and, and they were making a, a good amount of money at these farmer's markets working their tails off. And she would go, I think it was me, remember the details advance. She would go on a Monday and she would deliver the money. They'd made it to farmer's market to the bank. And one day when she was inside the bank, the teller told her, look, if you will just deposit less than 10,000 bucks. Oh yeah, oh yeah, she was getting sars, wasn't she suspicious, man, you know, you already know where I'm going, man.

Vance Crowe [00:47:51] Oh, that's gotta, that makes your life go into a living hell if you get on that list. She got, that's what they did. So they went ahead and started depositing, you know, 9,900 or 9,600 and stood of the 10 or 10,500. And eventually the government came after them. IRS agents armed, right? These boys were strapped. They showed up at Sours property and wanted to talk to him, and they'd already frozen his accounts. And basically what had happened, it all goes back to the Bank Secrecy Act, I think in 1973 or so, and he was accused of structuring, and structuring is a, in some ways it was a legit method to get drug dealers and money launderers people moving money in such a fashion. But they went after Randy Sour, a farmer who you only had to flip over a few pages to see. He wasn't involved in illegal action. So they wound up taking like 60, $70,000 away from him and the Attorney general to get this, the Attorney General of Maryland at the time was a fellow named Rod Rosenstein, whose name pops up all over the place and Rosenstein put them through the Wrangler, and eventually he caught the attention of Institute for Justice and was represented pro bono testified on Capitol Hill, and I forgot the name of the law, but just recently that whole structuring thing was overturned.

Vance Crowe [00:49:32] So now if the government wants to go after somebody because they deposit money, it has to be attached to some kind of illegal activity. I remember a gun owner, Vance, there was a guy that owned a gun store in Georgia, and he was a three time Iraq war veteran, and they got him for structuring and he 'cause of insurance, right? He took that money from his gun store and would always deposit it less than 10,000 for insurance purposes. They got him a froze out. I don't, man, 80,000 or something. And then I thought, I think he got his money back. Gross, gross. I'm sorry for that rabbit trail. You go, go right ahead, man. Well, I mean, what I'm, what I'm thinking is that you have a unique view into the trials that people living in the rural areas go through. And, you know, I've had an opportunity to, to travel around the country, met farmers and, and been around it quite a bit. But yours is a deeper level. It's something that can only come if you're a guy that can look for marbles at, you know, at a sharecropper's house. But it makes me wonder what your view is on what's going on in society today. Because my position is that we have a major, I would say civil war at this point on, on our hands. And just like the civil war of the past, it is an agrarian way of life or a rural and people living in the city coming into clash with one another for, and I think it's much, much more complicated, just like the Civil War was much, much more complicated than that.

Vance Crowe [00:51:05] But what you really have are a way that people think about their freedoms and about needing to protect themselves. And if you're living in a city, you are much more willing to give up rights because you need to be responsible. You need to fit in with, you know, millions of other people. You're living among hundreds of thousands of people in an apartment building, but in the countryside you're living in a totally different environment. So what do you, when you're watching what's going on in places like Kenosha, Wisconsin, what are you seeing? What are you observing that most other people might not observe? I tell you what Vance I, I, I think I'm pretty much running the mill fella and man, I wake up every morning blessed just, just to be in this country. Now, I, I'll say it without any hesitation at all, it's the greatest country in the world. It's every greatest country that's ever been. And the government can't legislate morality. They can come and they can lay down a million laws. They can't legislate and they cannot confer morality upon people. They can't, you can't chase racism out with laws. That's not going to happen either. There's an element right, of human nature to all of this and what, what, what what we see today is sociological breakdown, a bifurcation of the country. And if, if you would've told me Vance 30 years ago, said, Hey man, you know, people are gonna sit around and talk about the country geographically splitting or some sort of a neo civil war.

Vance Crowe [00:52:44] I'd have said, Vance, I don't know what you're talking about. But today, when people talk like that, it bends your ear. You listen, you project, and you think, Hey, could that, could that really happen? Could you have certain segments of the south break off or the west or what have you? I I don't know. It it, it comes down to me, you know, personal responsibility. Look, government is a necessary beast. It, it always has been, but we keep it as far away as we possibly can. And you know, I, I know your viewers and your listeners don't want political discourse outta me. I know very, very little, but I do know this, that I take care of my family. I'm just delighted to have the ability to make an honest dollar work for a wonderful organization and just be in this country, man. Just, just give me the opportunity. That's all I want. Outcome. You don't have to deal with outcome. But I want myself, I want my kids to have the ability to grab hold of the quality of opportunity. Sorry for the big long-winded answer. Are your kids are, are your kids getting close to college age? How old are they? I suppose so my daughter is 16, my son is 14. My my daughter's 14, excuse me, my son's 14.

Vance Crowe [00:54:16] My daughter's 16, in fact. Goodness. And as you guide them, what are, what are you telling them? Are you telling them college education go, go become an English major that can write? Are you saying go learn how to be an accountant? What, what advice are you giving them to be ready to face whatever this new world will be? Whether we're in a neoc civil war or not? You know, Vance, as a parent, I constantly make mistakes. My parenting is a series of mistakes. But I think I've just joined that for three weeks. I can tell you all I've done so far is make mistakes and accidentally done the right thing every once in a while. I think so brother. I think people, if they're honest, they'll admit that their parenting is a series of mistakes. But it's a series of mistakes that I honestly try and learn from. You know, all, all I can do is I do my best, love my kids and just say, Lord, protect my, my child, please. But what I do tell 'em is that you don't, right? Nobody owes you anything, but you have the ability to do whatever you want to do. And no matter what it is, I don't care what y'all do, do your best a hundred percent. So if they're running cross country vans or they're, you know, shooting at archery or doing their homework, I drill into 'em 99% and not good enough. You're going to be full of regret, push, push, push, push. And man, you know, Vance and I know that your kids are not equal.

Vance Crowe [00:55:50] They're given different intellects, different abilities. Bottom line is, man, I expect the God above expects a hundred percent. And if you do that right, if you give a hundred percent and you're just grateful to have a ticket to be in this country, you're going to do fine. You're gonna do just fine. So, yeah, I think, I mean, one of the things that I learned in the course of my wife and I having this child, it took us a long time, three years and, and a lot of heartache in between there. One of the things that I came to realize is that gratitude is the infrastructure of happiness. And that, and that, you know, you can't, you could be momentarily joyful or, or get some, you know, instant satisfaction or something, but you're not, you, you're not really capable of being truly happy unless you're grateful for things. And, and being grateful requires that you stop and you observe what's going on around you. Because anything that you have, any of the blessings you have, whether they're from God or hard work or any combination of the both, you, you, if you really understand how fortunate you are to have any of that, even if it's something as, you know, as simple as, as 10 fingers or two legs, right? You really begin to understand like, I, I could weep with joy for how fortunate I am. And, and it's it that can quickly, if you're not careful, turn into, well, I don't wanna lose anything, so I don't wanna take any risks, or I don't want anybody to attack it or I don't want to.

Vance Crowe [00:57:22] But at its core, if you take the time to be grateful for something, it fills you with a happiness that is, I'm, I'm glad to hear you describing it about having your kids go a hundred percent. Because if they do go a hundred percent, they will always be grateful. And then happiness is maybe not assured, but certainly they're on that path, right? Right. Vance, you know, at your age, at my age now, we can look back on our lives and you see, you already see forks in the road and you know, but for the grace that God go, I, and you already know, man, I'm, I'm glad I didn't go that way because who knows what would've happened. And you see the same thing in agriculture. It is fascinating because there are absolutely bizarre stories. I mean, if, if you just say the word bizarre, maybe it doesn't even, maybe it's not even a good enough qualifier, but human nature plays out on these farms. It's almost like Greek tragedies play out. And one of the craziest, one advance that, that, that I would submit you might ever hear is a guy named Jamie Lawhorn and an ag scam he pulled in Alabama, in the southeast. It goes from Jamie Lawhorn all the way to dog the bounty hunter. I never dreamed when I started this story, I'd be interviewing dog the bounty hunter. It's that, it's that insane. What Lawhorn did was he was a, the consummate con man.

Vance Crowe [00:58:56] I'm talking about like a Elmer Gantry and a Walter White all rolled into one. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty bad, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So he was pedestrian fella, very pedestrian looking about 40, 50 years old at the time. He rolled into it close to Huntsville, Alabama and set up what was called Cypress Creek Organic Farms. I think this started maybe 2013. And he had a wonderful pitch and that was, Hey, if you'll pay me about two $10,000, I'll come on your property and I'll build you a greenhouse, really a high tunnel, the frame and the plastic. I'll build you a greenhouse and then I'll give you the seedlings. I'll put you on the road to your organic certification and I'll buy back really for life. All the tomatoes you can produce at organic market value. So you pay me 10,000 and I'll buy your tomatoes forever. And we'll do, I mean, I'll, I'll do daily pickup, we'll come. So he wanted to set this network up across the southeast and he said he had all these grocery stores that were ready to buy the tomatoes. And the people came in droves. 2013 was the year that commodity prices, they, they were crashing, right? They were anemic. And this guy threw a lifeline out, Hey, you want some sidestream income? I'm your man, $10,000.

Vance Crowe [01:00:29] So a lot of people didn't just invest 10, they invested 20. So I invested more, right? Build me two houses, build me three. And the classic Ponzi scheme is you had to move fast. So he moved fast and pretty soon he had hundreds of these guys, these growers, he wound up taking in something like 2.2 or $2.5 million in these tomato contracts. And there was nothing to it, right? It was all a big shell. And when the heat got bad, the media and some of the government, right? And Bama found out what was going on. He then jumped right in the middle of the night, he went on the lamb and moved to North Carolina. And when he got to Carolina Vance, he started and the exact same operation except with Worms Vermaculture. So he went from tomatoes in Bama, moved to North Carolina, started Worm. I think the deal in with worms was, you gimme 5,000 and I'll provide you with the worms and I will buy them back in, you know, perpetuity. And so then I think he took in something like half a million maybe in worms. And when the heat got bad there, he went on the lamb again and was caught drunk driving maybe in South Carolina. So he was wanted for a bunch of other things. He'd been to Leavenworth, he had tried to sell the survival bunkers, all kind of Ponzi schemes. They took him back to Bama and they put him in, in, in, in the cell. They gave him an ankle bracelet, they let him out.

Vance Crowe [01:02:02] And his bail bondsman was a guy named Bill Hoya. Bill bonded him out and Longhorn cut off his ankle bracelet and took off to Florida. Now, what Lawhorn, the consummate criminal didn't know was that Hoya was what you might call Nia the best bounty hunter in the southeast. He's been on dog to Bounty hunter show. If you go through YouTube and look for Honney and Dog, you'll see Honney pop up, very good fella. So dog to Bounty Hunter started looking for this Longhorn out west, and Honney is looking, looking for him in the southeast. And what Longhorn had done was, like I said, he ran from Bama to Carolina to the worms. Then he went to Florida after he cut off his ankle bracelet and started an organic pickle Ponzi scheme. He got three of them going. Hony caught him, right? He caught him in Florida, I think close to Orlando, and he drug his can back to Bama. And on the way, Nia told me that while he was trying to get him back, you know, Longhorn tried to bribe him on the highway. Just let me go man. Let me go. I give you a hundred grand. Anyhow, he took him back. I think Longhorn was sentenced to, I can't remember, maybe two years, 10 years, didn't matter. They had one of those white collar amnesties and they let him out. So he's out there somewhere today, Lord knows what kind of scam he might have. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You just missed, like, you just jumped over the craziest part.

Vance Crowe [01:03:34] He got amnesty. Right, right, right. There was a lawsuit of some kind, and they swung the doors open in Bama and they released a lot of white collar criminals. And he was one of the guys that was able to walk. So I think he ended up serving maybe less than two years, something like that. Bizarre. His, he echoes, I, I assume, I don't know this Vance, I assume he learned a lot from a guy named Greg Bradley. Greg Bradley, anybody can Google him, was about 40 years old in Oklahoma. Greg Bradley in about the year 2000 started b and B Worm Farm in Oklahoma and took the nation for 25 million in illicit gain, 25 million. They caught up with him with Bradley and his Ponzi scheme after several years. And he died mysteriously, right? No one's quite sure if he got the flu or what. He died and his wife had his body cremated immediately. So a lot of the growers that got took by Greg Bradley's $25 million worm scheme were always convinced that Bradley had run off to the Caymans or something like that and still has the money. But I, I, I don't know any of that. But my point is, these guys are, they're out there a dime a dozen right now. I don't have it published yet, but I'm working on a story by a guy named Robert Carl Stokes. Robert Carl Stokes conducted advance, what is arguably the biggest crop insurance fraud case in United States history.

Vance Crowe [01:05:08] It was, if I remember right, it was a hundred plus million. It was suspected of being far, far more. And he had a little place in North Carolina and they were double dipping on crop insurance. In other words, they would pretend right, that weather took part of their crop. So they would get reimbursed for that Vance, and then that part of the crop that they claim was damaged, they would put it on the back lot and then slide it into the black market. So you got paid twice and they busted Robert, Carl Stokes with wires, man, high jinx, secret informants, all that kind of stuff. It took, it took several years to get him. So it, it was like a Cohen, right? It's like the Cohen Brothers come to life. Something like that. Anyway, you know, it's interesting because, you know, we were talking before about massive overreach by the government, and then you think about, well, there are some, some dudes out there that are willing to do some pretty crazy things and they're clever enough to get away with it. And so you've got that tension between, between cheaters and, and people getting beaten up by the government. So Grifters fans, grifters, there's a segment of agriculture that's always been available for Grifters. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Jerusalem artichoke scandal that hit the early 1980s, but in the Jerusalem artichoke scandal, right? Those guys took in, I think it was several million dollars, mainly from Minnesota growers, but it happened in lots of other states as well.

Vance Crowe [01:06:46] They pushed Jerusalem artichokes, which are really, you know, like tubers. They pushed those as being the end all, be all for fuel, for health, you name it. And that Ponzi scheme, it entirely crashed. What was interesting about that case, there was a guy, there was two or three of these guys involved. One of 'em was named Jim Dwyer, and I talked to Min when I interviewed the Minnesota Department of Agriculture secretary at the time. He told me that whenever Dwyer would show up and try and bend his ear, that Dwyer kept the Bible tucked under his arm. And I said, did he open the Bible? Did he? He said, no, no, no. He just always had it with him. Made sure you could see that Bible. I was fascinated, just fascinated by that. 'cause if I was a conman Vance, I would never even come across. I thought, okay, I gotta give him credit for the Bible scam, because that part of it would never enter my mind. And he's, he's done, graduated to a high degree of chicanery. So, you know, the, we're we're heading into harvest, at least up here. And it's kind of a dangerous time for people, right? There are a lot of accidents that happen. And I know that accidents, farm accidents are something you've done a lot on. What, what, what insight do you have on farm accidents that regular people might not know much about? You know, once you get that machinery moving, particularly at harvest o often at planting as well, but once that machinery gets moving, people don't realize vance the immensity of it and the noise it makes and the dust that it kicks up.

Vance Crowe [01:08:26] And when you have all of those things combined with long hours, then you are invariably headed toward danger. And that's why you consistently see deaths out there in agriculture, no matter what kind of safety measures they, they put on you. And, you know, families get wrecked. And I mean, just, it's like taking a hammer to the ankles of a family where you might have the young sign of a family that's maybe he's 25 years old and the only son, and he goes out to the field and he dies. That by itself is bad enough. But when you look at the legacy, when it becomes all the more traumatic, there was a wonderful young man named Brock Guss up in North Dakota, one of the most bizarre deaths. So sad. He was the only son that they had. They had a, a farm, a row crop farm, and they had a export business as well. His daddy did Roger Cassese fine gentleman. And Brock was tilling one day, I can't remember how many years it's been, but it's not been long at all. And I think Brock was 28, 27 at the time. He was tilling, kept a little dog with him in the cab because this could be anybody. And that dog had to go to the bathroom and he let that dog outta the cab. He stopped the tractor and the dog got down, ran into the field and saw a mouse like would normally happen. And the dog started trying to kill the mouse. And you know, nine times outta 10, Brock would've drove on, but he didn't.

Vance Crowe [01:10:01] He got down outta the cab and went to check on the little dog. I think the dog might've been a rat too. It was a small dog. Anyway, the mouse was laying there and Brock assumed it was dead. And he picked the mouse up and it bit him on the hand. He got back in the cab mouse bite, no big deal. What he didn't know was that at that very moment, he had just contracted H virus from the mouse, and that infection was already roaring through his veins. He was dead 10 days later. Brock was, nobody had any idea. And he checked himself into the hospital, I think like a week later. And they just thought he was low on fluids. No one had a clue that he had this very rare H virus, I think the mortality rate on H virus in the us, something like 40%. Don't quote me on that, Vince, but it's bad. It's bad. So they sent him home from the emergency room, he continued to farm, they were at planting, and his body wore down on him. 28 years old. He walks out of the cornfield, drives home, goes into his living room, literally writes his wheel down on a piece of paper. So this fellow knew something was inside his core wrong, writes his wheel down, puts it on the table, and goes and lays down on the bed. And, and, and fig, figuratively never gets back up. His family then comes to him, they take him to the emergency room and he dies in the hospice. It was 10 days, it was 10 days from start to finish.

Vance Crowe [01:11:32] Anyway, that's the only son that just, it pulls everything out from the feet of a family that's left entirely devastated. That's just an example. But you, you know, Vance, the, the guys that lose fingers, the guys that lose digits, you can't even, you can't even keep track. The, the one that, I mean, it just blows me away. There's several blowing me away. But there was a guy named Samson Parker a few years ago in North Carolina. Samson, I think at the time would've been maybe in his mid forties. And he was on his way to work. He was a high, he was, he worked in highway construction, but he had 50 or a hundred acres of corn that he would sell for deer, corn. He needed to go harvest that day. So he made his way to the fields. He lived in North Carolina, the farmland was in South Carolina an hour away. So he drove down to his fields, complete isolation, and he got in his tractor, I think don't, I'm not, don't quote me on tractors, don't know much about tractor. I think it was a John Deere 28 40, maybe a 75 horsepower or something like that. Smaller tractor, not a huge one. And then in, and then behind that, he had a 1960s one row picker. And then behind that he had a wagon. So he had a caravan van, three vehicles, he's by himself in his field driving through there, one rope picker, slow going, he got a flat tire, he stops the vehicle, attaches a pump to the tire to reinflate the tire. It takes a long time. And he goes around behind the picker. So he's behind the picker, the wagon's behind him.

Vance Crowe [01:13:05] And he noticed that the picker was filling up with trash and not discharging properly. Tractors turned off and there was a corn piece of, there was a piece of corn that was stuck in these rollers. I think there was six perpendicular rollers. And they, they were separated by less than an inch. And that corn was wedged down in there. And he yanked and yanked and couldn't get it out. So he thought, okay, I'll go around and turn the tractor on and it'll shoot it out. And he did. So he came back around and that it was still there. And he made the mistake he had on gloves and made the mistake to grab it. And as he grabbed it, it pulled his hand through and immediately, right his description, immediately, you know, chunks of his hand through the glove began to roll down his arm. So he's reaching through the back of the picker, he's got meat coming down his arm and he's entirely alone. And that thing is just pulling him into the machine, literally pulling him into the machine. He's big guys like 6 3, 6 4, you know, 200 plus pounds. He did everything he could to get that thing stopped. So he stuck there for an hour and a half, two hours, and he takes off. He really takes off all of his clothes, takes off his boots, throws 'em over the top of the picker, takes off his belt. Wait, how long was he there for? He, that part of it Vance, that part where he stuck with his hand in there took I think an hour and a half plus. Oh my God. Yeah. And he described the pain. He said, I can't even label the pain. I can't tell you about the pain.

Vance Crowe [01:14:36] He said the pain was other, other worldly. He said, I literally am watching the flesh continue to roll down my arm. So he threw every object, hard object that he had on him, almost inside the picker, trying to get those bars stopped. He couldn't get 'em stopped. And eventually reached behind him where the hitch was on that back trailer. And he managed to pull out a cotter pin and he got that thing and he reached around blindly to the side of the picker, which was running right. And he managed to jam it in the change and the gears on the side of the picker and he couldn't believe it. And his claim is, he straight up tell you, this was providence that did this, not him. The picker wedged and stopped it, lurched. He got the thing stopped, and then with it stopped, he attempted once again to pull his hand out. He could not get it out, could not get the handout. So that morning when he left from his house and he sat there on the bed and put on his work boots, there was a brand new John Deere knife that he had been given at a NASCAR event by a dealer. This thing had never even been used. It was sitting on his dresser. He didn't carry a knife, he told me. And his wife told me that not one day in his life had he ever carried a knife, but on that day he stopped by the dresser, dropped it in his pocket and went on to work. So he remembers this, he reaches in his pocket, it's like a, maybe a three inch blade locked back knives. It's small.

Vance Crowe [01:16:07] Oh no. Oh no. He reaches over the top of the picker and he says, you know what, I'm gonna cut my hand off. Oh, and I'm gonna get outta here. So he told me the feeling was mainly gone out of his hand. And he began to cut. He cut the first finger off, couldn't get it out, cut the second finger off, couldn't get his hand out, cut the third finger off. And by the time after he cuts off the third finger, he still can't get it out. And he smells, he smells accurate smoke. And what had happened, Vance, was that while he was cutting off that third finger, the machine right in its protest, the machine is in open rebellion and it was beginning to throw sparks slip, clutch was beginning to throw sparks, and the sparks were landing on the rubber tire of the picker and it actually caught fire. So while he's got the knife, my gosh, the machine catches fire and instinctively he drops the knife. So he loses the knife, it drops into the picker, and as it drops in the picker, the thing, everything catches fire. And he, he, he'll tell you, he says, man, when your arm and your hand catches fire, he goes, and you can't move it. He goes, you can watch the fat roll right down your arm and onto your elbows, says you can, you can just watch it. He goes, I can't describe the pain. So he, he tried everything he could do, tried to pull his arm off, he's on fire, the machine's on fire. So he knew then I've gotta cut my arm off. But he didn't have the knife, he had dropped the knife. So he blindly reached over the thing. He said, the first time I reached over, I grabbed the knife.

Vance Crowe [01:17:38] He said that by itself was provident. He said, I pulled it back out with my other hand and about an inch or two below his elbow, he said, I stuck it in. And I began to cut. He said, I passed out immediately. He said, I passed out immediately. He said, I think I was out for about 20 seconds. He said, I wake back up, I'm still burning. The knife is stuck in my arm. He said, I continued on around, he said, I cut the whole circle. And I asked him, I said, how long it take you to make that cut? He said, I don't know, maybe 15 seconds. He said, now I was, I was fast, it was a sharp knife. And then I pulled Vance. Once he pulled, then he still couldn't get out, the bone wouldn't go. So he squatted down, jumped up in the air as far as he could get it, then brought that arm down on the side of the picker wall and he snapped that bone and it, when he snapped the bone, the picker tire blew, it blew him back three or four feet. He jumps up like he's in his sock feet and he runs through the field, blood shooting three or four feet, gets in his cab and takes off for the highway to get some help. And once he got to the highway, nobody would stop because his whole cab was covered in blood. Oh my God. Eventually people stopped to help him. And what was interesting when I was talking to the guy that that stopped to help him, a fireman, wonderful fellow named Doug Spanx, Spanx said that, he goes, man, when I crawled in that cab, he said, there was so much blood inside the cab. He said, I could taste it. I said, what do you, what do you mean? He said, it was in the air.

Vance Crowe [01:19:09] He said there was a metal taste in the air. I could taste his blood even though I wasn't touching it. That really struck me. Anyway, what, what's bizarre detail, when the fire department went back to put that fire out, they found his forearm, the bone, and they found the three finger bones, but they couldn't find the knife. Weeks or months later, some family friends were out there playing in the field. Two little boys found the knife that he had used about 20 feet away. So Parker Sampson, Parker figured that when that tire blew and blew him back, the knife must have shot that far back. So today, if you go into the Parker house, it's on the wall in the kitchen. That knife is, they keep it there as a reminder of they say what God did for them. Just, and, and you know, Vance, keep in mind that's one story of many that are out there, but he is a far, far, far, far tougher man than me. Oh my God. I mean, 30 seconds of that. And I, I mean I, I can imagine that I'd give up like I I, to, to any one of those steps would be enough to just absolutely level a person. This is right. Right. But he's okay now. Have family lived on, oh, he's got, I mean, he's got an artificial arm, but he's gone on with life. He speaks at lots of events and wonderful family. Him and his wife. Very, very, very decent, very decent people.

Vance Crowe [01:20:41] Wow. Holy geez. Man, that was a story. I, you, my friend, were absolutely born to do this job. You are excellent at storytelling. And man, I feel like this was a wild education and a, and a great conversation. I, I am so glad you came on here, Chris Bennett and I, I, I really, I, I hope we can do this again and again. You, you are welcome to come back on the show anytime, Lance, these, these farmers, they have, like I said at the beginning, they've got 1,000,001 stories out there just waiting to be told. But hey, it's entirely my privilege for being on here. Thank you for tolerating me and it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Well, I will have you back on very soon. Thank you so much. Stay safe out there and keep those stories coming. I'll read anything you write. Hey, you try and get you some sleep too, Vance. Good daddy. I'll try. Thanks. Hey, have a great day, man. Take care. Bye now.