Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

I was wondering if any of you had encountered weird thefts or attempted thefts on the farm.

Here are a few recent ones on this farm

 

1. Six ton concrete filled roll.  They tried to winch it onto a car trailer and judging by the skidmarks and general mayhem (glove trapped under the roll but no hand in it!) it won the battle and ended up in the hedge about thirty yards from where it had been left by me.  Did they think it had a lot of metal in it?

 

2.  Wood burning stove. They went down to a cabin on a dead end track in a snow storm in the middle of the night. The track down there has deep ditches and you know how difficult it is driving in white out conditions normally let alone without lights. Put a ladder up on the slippery roof which had three inches of snow on it, carefully undid screws holding the ridge cap, took the flue then manhandled the very heavy  (and very ugly and unvaluable) stove into a pickup.  It took me and two other strong blokes to put it in there. We only put it there because nobody wanted it!

They did not steal far more valuable things including a crate of twelve bottles of beer!

 

3. Two safety mirrors on long poles just outside the farm entrances.  They were welded to the poles and the poles were put in with the teleporter.

 

4.  Last week  we blocked two gateways as a deterrent with some fifteen foot  lengths of old pine that was so rotten it was dust inside.  We had to put them down carefully so that we did not break them.  They were nicked the same night right by the main crossroads!

 Yes.

Local Drug addict stole fom us : Desk fan, electrical connectors, parcel tape, paper towels, sack trucks, battery charger, label printer ribbons and a few other things so trivial that I can't remember what they were.  50 grand tractor on demonstration and unregistered at the end of the track, completely untouched.

Got caught due to taking a bottle of milk out of a van, drinking it and throwing the bottle away - thank goodness for DNA testing and date coding, got all our stuff back and a successful prosecution.

Just as bizarrly, police wouldn't tell us the name of the theif, but when the batter charger came back, his name was written on it. 

Someone nicked a road sign from down the road t'other day aswell ????

Farmer Dan 6465:

police wouldn't tell us the name of the theif

 

They should have, especially once they were charged. 

Local, well known drug user, dug up most of the daffodills from the far end of our garden..... cut off the stems and heads.... just took the bulbs..... apparently there is some thing in them when boiled up for about 6 hours !

farmertaff:

apparently there is some thing in them when boiled up for about 6 hours

 

Probably not what you would expect a local druggie to be cooking up. Daff bulbs contain lycorine which can make you very poorley. But also galantamine which is used for memory drugs. I think you can get galantamine as a diety suppliement, so DIY sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/8007175.stm

were abouts are you based ploughshare we have had are fair share of funny ones three plastic diesel drums nothing in them ! left 2 full ones of hydro and then found the stolen drums 2 miles up the road on the verge theres no rime nor reason to these monkeys also stole my tractor door and bonnet pannels !

 

farmertaff:

<p>Local, well known drug user, dug up most of the daffodills from the far end of our&nbsp;garden..... cut off the stems and heads.... just took the bulbs..... apparently there is some thing in them when boiled up for about 6 hours !</p>

You have just reminded me about an incident last spring when I came out of the yard and found someone picking the Daffodils right outside the front gate of one of our cottages.  I was not in a good mood having just smacked my hand on the powerharrow and went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing.
"None of your effing business" was the reply.  
"I think that you will find that it is my business as I planted these flowers and they were for the benefit of the people living in this house and not for your benefit"
He carried on picking the flowers
"Are you deaf?"
"My wife is sick in hospital and these are for her"
" Well you tight git go and buy some flowers for her like everybody else!"
Carries on picking and it was at this point I felt like violence but I had a sudden vision of the newspaper headline "Angry Farmer attacks innocent man who was just picking flowers for sick wife"  So for the sake of the good name of our industry I walked away!
I now know that I should have remembered to turn the video on my phone and record everything as he was a taxi driver and at least I could have reported him to the licencing authority.

In the end there is now a level of lawlessness around  that is not worth pursuing

That's just reminded me. A few years ago I caught a landscape gardener loading stone into his pick-up from an old stone wall that runs along the roadside through our woods. I asked him what he was doing and he told me that he was taking the stone and that the council wouldn't give a ****. I told him that perhaps the council didn't care because it wasn't their wall, and if he didn't put it back immediately I would put some of the said stone through his windscreen. He begrudgingly put back the stone, but couldn't help muttering that he had mates in Swansea who would come and break my legs for 200 quid. I told him I had mates in the village who would come and break his legs for nothing. Never saw him again.

 contractors round here had an old fuel tank full of water, all the water got stolen one night, funny thing is, the fuel tank would have been just the other side of whatever they were driving. obviously a pretty clever theif that one!

Not as funny as some above, but three years ago I had two olive trees stolen - ripped out of the ground. Young trees close to the highway so a rope and a car could have done it. Two local blokes passing stopped and said "French tourists".

 On the other side of the farm a plumber had his quad bike stolen at around 8.00 p.m after dark.  The thief took off over our fields and loaded up into a transit.  We wondered how he knew how to drive from the plumber's house to the gateway a hundred acres away shielded by contours and woods.

Everyone said well the thieves are so clever nowadays they look on Google Earth before they do a job.

We expected never to see the quad again but two days later the local police telephoned the plumber to say that they thought they had found it and would he like to come to the station to identify it.  He said he would go after work , so he turned up to find a young hoodie remonstrating with the policeman at the desk. "what do you effing think you're doing breaking into my effing lockup I got my rights etc etc."

Plumber said  "Well that's my quad, and those are my tools with it, and my copper cylinders strapped to the back"

Policeman said "Sonny you're nicked!"

I really believe that the lad thought that the quad was his.  Was yours now it's mine mentality.  Police raided his lockup after the landlord became suspicious.  Not so much a bizarre theft, but certainly a bizarre attitude by the thief to turn up and complain to the police!

Policeman told the plumber that there are a lot of decent people like himself who go out to work from 8.00 till 5.00, but there is another lot who sleep all day and start work after dark.,,,,,,,

 Not far from us there's a small industrial estate at the side of the very busy A616 & when they built it they put a mound of earth at the entrance & put an old army tank on top which was there for years... until a couple of years ago when one day apparently in broad daylight someone turned up with a low loader & a crane, loaded it up & away they went. If they'd come at night someone would have maybe questioned if they should have been moving it.

Mind you there are also the ones who work the night shift & it won't be the 1st time we've seen someone up to no good whilst delivering milk when most people are in bed. There's one in particular that i can think of that doesn't have a job (they did find him one once but he went the 1st day & didn't like it so he hasn't had one since) He is well known to the police but they can never pin owt on him. We see him regularly at 3 or 4am wandering around the housing estates, never off the road & never carrying owt but i'm sure he isn't out at that time cos he can't sleep

that water theft story reminded me of a local farmer who was always having deisel stolen.

he got fed up and topped up the tank with water one day.

needless to say it got nicked, and he thought no more about it.

two days later there was an emergency at sea as all the local fishing boats had conked out , out in the north sea in dodgy weather.

they managed to rescue everybody, but he then got his hay sheds burnt.

glasshouse:

but he then got his hay sheds burnt

 

Thats the troubble with doing anything llike that

Dave5465:

 Not far from us there's a small industrial estate at the side of the very busy A616 & when they built it they put a mound of earth at the entrance & put an old army tank on top which was there for years... until a couple of years ago when one day apparently in broad daylight someone turned up with a low loader & a crane, loaded it up & away they went. If they'd come at night someone would have maybe questioned if they should have been moving it.

Mind you there are also the ones who work the night shift & it won't be the 1st time we've seen someone up to no good whilst delivering milk when most people are in bed. There's one in particular that i can think of that doesn't have a job (they did find him one once but he went the 1st day & didn't like it so he hasn't had one since) He is well known to the police but they can never pin owt on him. We see him regularly at 3 or 4am wandering around the housing estates, never off the road & never carrying owt but i'm sure he isn't out at that time cos he can't sleep

 

 

 This one from Dave reminded me of an incident that I had forgotten about some years ago.  We were ploughing some sugarbeet land, two Ford 8210s  chasing each other one Sunday. A few days earlier the gas men had come with an artic lorry load of bright yellow big gas main pipes and laid them on the road verge by this field.. 

At around midday on this Sunday another big artic pulled up and a couple of men jumped out both wearing yellow reflective safety jackets and we thought blimey, job must be well paid for them to start work on the main on a Sunday.  They loaded the pipes and took them away. We still did not think anything unusual had happened until Monday morning came and there were quite a few perplexed looking gas men looking for their pipes!

But what on earth would they have done with them as surely they were only any use to gas men and not worth much to anyone else or does anybody here know something about their value?

 

We

 

if any of the fishermen had died, it would have been an interesting enquiry!

 If you see someone with all the flashing lights & reflective jackets you dunt think owt of it. I remember another fairly local theft that someone told me about a few years ago. They were doing some work on the motorway & parked their mini digger up on friday at 4pm & around 5 a low loader pulled up, loaded it up & away they went. Monday morning when the theft was discovered the police were called & informed that it was fitted with a tracker. "right we'll get it back for you then" said the policeman. They picked the tracker up a couple of miles off the motorway ... fitted to to an old stolen escort van.

Another one was just a few hundred yards down the road from us where they were starting work on rebuilding an electric substation. The only thing they had on site was a couple of portakabins for offices & when the foreman arrived for work one morning the security man was sat in the dark & said "I think someone has stolen my generator"