Roadside debris

[Kay/NC]

On water usage:  NCDA has been "surverying " our wellwater and surface water usage for a number of years now.  I do not run meters, and with 14,000 hogs adn various and sundry sheep dn horses all drinking here, we do use quite a bit daily. 

Supposedly, they are trying to prove that ag "doesn't  use much water."  What a load of crap!  Water is grass is meat, and water is the most important nutrient of any living thing.  Water rights are the next battlegroundand will become our next bottleneck in ag...see California for reference. 

My default has been to give them my possible draw:  Ten wells that can draw 2-3 gpm, and five more that we have not been able to pump off with a 60 gpm gasoline pump when they were drilled.  We run 20gpm pumps on those five, and so I calculate that as my possible usage, plus the ten pasture wells. 

My rationale is that when anyone wants to start rationing my draw, I have established my vested use in that many gallons.  Let's just say, I've seen "voluntary" become "mandatory" too many times in farming to trust them this time.  Heaven help them if anyone tries to send me a bill for my water...I brought it to the surface first, which is the test of water rights, I think.   

On the housing thing, I think you may well me right on the mark.  Everyone needs shelter, but not everyone can own a home. 

When you try to force the American Dream too far, it becomes an American Nightmare.  Or, put  it this way: Is it better to have a home and lose it to foreclosure, than to never have had one at all?  I doubt it. 

[Kay/NC]

The first time I saw this place, when Mike and I were shopping land for the hog operation in 1994, a kid was buzzing across the ends of some cotton rows on a four-wheeler.  Found out he was a 14-year-old whose father had set him up in a house out here in the country, and left him with his not much older sister in another house in the same yard. 

He turned into a true stalker of our middle child, the older of our two daughters.  We had to spend four years off-and-on dragging his sorry rear to court, getting the judge to order him a five mile distance from our home.  That meant his parents, who were divorced, had to actually live with him in their homes, back and forth.   

Catching him in violation, seeing him hanging around the site of a "mysterious" fire that happened to somehow get set right across the road from us, etc., was nervewracking.   He could always get away before the law arrived, because his stupid parents put a police band radio in his car, and one on his 4-wheeler, too.  What legitimate purpose does a kid have with that kind of thing?

I used to count and make notes of him driving an unlicensed car, long before he was old enough to drive, back and forth in front of our house.   His lousy attorney tried to make that out that he was visiting his great-aunt down the road...to which I said on the stand, "27 times in one afternoon?" 

I watched two different judges throw the book at him, but because he was a minor, there was only so much book they could throw, at least at first.  He finally got scared enough of jail time to get so he'd stay away. 

A person who does not respect your property will not respect you, either.  Some people, if you give them an inch, willl take the whole mile.  We just start with NO, and rarely move from that point. 

[nwobcw]

   To update this I would like to add a suggestion.  Cans I can deal with but it's the glass bottles that upset me.  Since most beer containers are the result of drinking and driving I presume the beer was bought at a carryout etc.  Why not outlaw the sale of beer for off site consumption?   Maybe just the threat of it with articles in the news would get some of these trashers to clean up their act.

[Kay/NC]

Don't know how the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Commission) laws work in your state, but in NC and VA, there are definite on-premises and off-premises licensing differences.  An on-premises license can be complicated by requirements to sell a comparable amount of food to beer receipts. 

Granted, we have state control of all but beer and wine sales.  Hard liquor is only sold in state stores.  Used to limit any alcohol sales on Sundays (Blue laws) and it's still not sold here on Election Day. 

Have seen beer coolers chained shut during martial law events after hurricances, too...which blew our minds the first time we saw it!  We have a couple of dry counties left in NC - no alcohol sales at all.  It takes a public referendum to pass "liquor by the drink" for local restaurants. 

Our county still lacks that policy, but you can carry a bottle of hard spirits in, and buy setups, which they call "brown-bagging."  How much more confusing can you get, when it comes to drinking and driving? 

Some discussion of privatization of liquor sales has been had, but it's fallen flat so far. 

In all, a complex regulatory issue.  Litter is the last thing that the state thinks about...it's really all about the Benjamins. 

[highyields]

I am constantly picking up beer bottles I think sometimes they see how far in the field they can through it, what really aggravates me is when they through them in my alfalfa field.   No one gives a **bleep** thats what I don't like.  People cut through by my house cause they think "its the country" and they're won't be any cops out there, I've had people drunk beyond drunk and ask me if I wanted a beer when I was working along the road, "just having a few after work" they aren't driving at excessive speed but some do think my road is an interstate.   You ever found a pile of grass clippings in your road ditch?   Oh yeah thats happen to me, one farm we use to farm somebody drove in almost a 1/4 of a mile and dumped, a whole pickup load of yard waste, I mean EVERTYHING, grass clippings, leaves, sticks, what a mess.   Its just the" I don't give a **bleep** disease" about letting garbage and stuff blew out of your car and what not.   Before I mow roads I walk around to try and pick up as many beer bottles as possible so i dont' ruin a tire. 

We find McDonalds sack, once a full bag of groceries someone must of left on there roof of the car, furniture, we have a small creek someone through a GLASS table of the bridge one winter, glass never goes away.   I wish they would make all beer in plastic bottles for off sale.   that would help.  

Yeah I don't miss acreages for sale signs. 

[Roy_Smith]

A rental farm lays between two residental areas. I get a lot of paper sacks, plastic pools etc blowing in the field. Generally I just run them through the combine at harvest because they are light weight and breaking them up speeds the decomposition. One day while harvesting soybeans there was a cement sack between the rows. Instinct told me not to run it through the combine. When the field was finished I went back to get the sack. Imagine my surprise. It was not a cement sack. It was an 80 pound sack of cement. How do you suppose it got into my bean field? It certainly did not blow there! What a close call. I wonder how much damage that would have done to my combine.....Soyroy

[Kay/NC]

How far into the field was that sack?  That sounds like deliberate sabotage. 

When we first moved here, we had a new neighbor move in a year or two later, while we were still renting out most of the land.  This guy hired a crew to prune his trees and shrubs, and they just dragged the whole mess into the middle of a field.  Probably three or four pickup loads.  Other neighbor called to let us know, since it was back behind her house, but on our land. 

I went over to visit the guy, who came out in flipflops, with his feet all bandaged up, and asked him to get it moved.  He pointed to his feet, and said it would have to wait.  I said he could hire the same folks who dragged it out there to drag it all back to his yard...my field was not a **bleep** landfill. 

Or, I said, you can leave it there and ruin a quarter-million-dollar cotton picker.  I will tell Mr. Jones, my tenant, to come see you if it does.... 

Pile was moved the next day.

Same jerk put all his hurricane debris onto our land, even though the county announced to pile it in the front yard road ditches for pickup.  Mike took the frontend loader over and pushed it back over the property line.  He wanted to get irate.  We offered to light a match if it came back...right next to his shed. 

This was the same shed his installers set ten feet over our line.  That day, I walked over and thanked him for the new shed.  It was moved the next day. 

He threw a nasty fit in our yard one day, cussing at Mike that the tenant had plowed up his yard.  When he did that, we went over and found the corner pins of his lot, and marked his puny yard, which was maybe half the size he thought it was.  Should have let a sleeping dog lie.  His kid's trampoline and some other crap had to move in a lot tighter to the house, for sure. 

His wife has remarked to me a couple of times that he "really wants to add onto the house, but our lot is too small."  (Can't build towards the only other neighbor, even if he'd sell them some of his house lot, due to setbacks.)  All I would say is, "Isn't that a shame...."  

[Jim Meade / Iowa City]

Daughter walked all our road ditches today.  The grass is growing so fast if she didn't it would cover the trash.

[nwobcw]

   Buy a golf cart Jim.  You'll find many uses for it.  If you have a dog they love riding on it too.   My landlords appreciate me keeping their roadsides picked up.   I know walking is good exercise but  don't want to wear out my legs.   Grass just started growing over the weekend here.

[SouthWestOhio]

Jim, Can I borrow your daughter for an aftenoon? 🙂